The Question of Participation: Urban Interstitial Production as it Responds to the Olympic Machine

Margit Neuhold 33102248 Dissertation

MA Contemporary Art Theory 2008/09 Department of Visual Cultures Goldsmiths University of London

Thanks to: Andy Lowe

Gill Brown Orianna Cacchione Sole Garcia Marianne Mulvey Martin Slavin Carolyn Smiths Thomas Pausz Hilary Powell

The Question of Participation: Urban Interstitial Production as it Responds to the Olympic Machine

Introduction...... 2 1.1. Modes of Participation...... 8 1.2 Transformations shaping the contemporary city ...... 12 1.2.1. EXCURSUS: URBAN PUBLIC(S) AND THEIR SPHERE(S) ...... 15

1.3. The Olympic Spirit ...... 18 1.4. The Olympic Machine ...... 22 1.4.1. WINNING THE BID...... 25 1.4.2. MOBILIZING JUDICIARY POWER ...... 27 1.4.3. IN SEARCH FOR A LEGACY ...... 29 1.4.4. EXCURSUS: EXERCISING URBAN SOCIAL CONTROL...... 32 1.4.5. EXCURSUS: UNRAVELLING THE COMMUNITY MYTH...... 35 1.4.6. MAINTAINING PUBLIC ORDER ...... 37

2. 1. The Micropolitics of the Interstices...... 41 2.2. Manual to the Rhizomatic Appendix ...... 45 2.2.1. EXCURSUS: SOCIAL FORMATIONS ...... 48

2.3. Undoing the Fence...... 51 2.4. Transsectoral practices ...... 54 2.4.1. CONCATENATION OF ART AND ACTIVISM ...... 55 2.4.2 PSYCHOGEOGRAPHICAL PRODUCTION...... 58 2.4.3. BUILDING FUTURE MEMORIES...... 60

Appendix TIMELINE E-MAIL RHIZOMATIC APPENDIX ...... 63 Bibliography …………………………………………………………….………….. 74

Introduction

The subject of investigation will be the Olympic Games 2012 in the framework of the contemporary city. Investigating the Games’ history from World War II onwards, since 1948 there have been no announced Games which did not take place. Any resistance to stop the powerful Olympic machine after winning the bid has been proven pointless. Instead the Games call for participation on a variety of levels, from the state apparatus, corporations, institutions and people through all social strata: workforce, volunteers, athletes, children, visitors and a global audience. Hence to me it seems that the most important question to raise is the one of participation.

Since the decision was made for London to host the Olympic Games the question of its legitimisation needs to be addressed. In a social democratic structure it is thought that citizens hold the power and the political ground functions through an ethos of participation. The relation between the governing and the governed operate on the governmental interface of participation. Various platforms require participation: e.g. referendum, platforms of codeterminations, citizens’ groups, and consultations. Through participation the democratic system functions, legitimises and concurrently sets up different relationships of power. The process of implementing the Olympic Games has to go through a major consultation phase and requires the strong support of citizens. Hence, the call for participation and their responses operate on many different levels: dialogues and consultations, administration, volunteering, providing jobs and businesses, training, education, calls for ideas to contribute.

There is no homogenous framework within which to participate. Participation demands positioning, and in turn offers the potential to each to be perceived within the framework and chosen position. This project understands participation as a hinge and unfolds it as a major structuring process, defining politics and its function. In search for counter-models and alternatives fostering the neoliberal and capitalist production this project approaches participation from an activist point of view. I will explore participation within certain conditions, namely the implementations of change in the contemporary city since these political embedded transformations function through participation. Yet, the concept of participation cannot be reduced to rational parameters. Therefore

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I aim to investigate its operations and meanings for two reasons: to reveal its complexity and in turn to extract (non)systemic functions from its different agencies.

At the beginning I will investigate models and means of participations on both the macro and micropolitical scale, not to punctuate their binary oppositions— ‘system compliant’ versus resistant—but to provide an understanding of their operating forces. My investigation is based on post-structural analysis and owes much to concepts and ideas by Michel Foucault, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari. The first chapter investigates participatory strategies starting on a structural level, whereas the second chapter aims to emphasize the socio-political level.

The first part of the project starts with the exploration of the rising significance of the contemporary city staging the Olympic Games under the current conditions of late capitalism, the rising Empire. As such compressed nodes cities compete for mega spectacles—which presupposes a precise functioning infrastructure informing a set of mechanisms operating on its social and territorial production—in an entrepreneurial mode. The urban production shifted from manufacturing goods towards meta-production: the buying of finished products, assembling them and introducing new markets, a strand of what Gilles Deleuze calls the control society. 1 Capitalism sells services and buys activities, which is exactly were the Olympic Games fits in; London will host an activity and sell services. Industrial production lost its hegemony, and production shifted towards immaterial or biopolitical production, the production of ideas, information, social relationships, affects or codes and towards affective labour in the service industry. To fully grasp the impacts of what is triggered by the Olympic Games, I briefly investigate the discourse on urban public(s) and their sphere(s). Its significance for democratic processes—which are required for the Games’ implication—unfold with Chantal Mouffe’s critique on the Habermasian model and further models on a plebeijan public sphere, counterpublics or post- publics.

1 See Gilles Deleuze. “Postscript on Control Societies.“ Negotiations, 1972-1990. European perspectives. New York: Columbia University Press, 1995: 177-182 : 181.

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The following exploration of the emergence of the modern Olympic Games (1896) maps them as part of an early movement operating on the biopolitical level. Propaganda operated for the strength and efficacy of the body to mobilize masses and to industrialize popular health. This historical development instrumentalising and institutionalising participation by means of sports and leisure activities underlines my rational and critical approach towards the Olympic Charter stating the six ‘Fundamental Principles of Olympism’.

All these sections provide the backdrop to understand the operation of the Olympic machinery. A roughly chronological investigation, starting from winning the bid in July 2005 to August 2009, will demonstrate the operations of power structures and outline its overarching machinic production ruled by a centralized powercenter. This demonstration of a systemic channeling of power— enabled through a rational functioning mode—penetrating and infiltrating the state-apparatus concurrently maps the synthesis of sovereignty and capital. This alliance embodied in the Olympic agency acts as a powerful tool overriding existing power structures, and producing a new body of agents; they concurrently become nodes, translating, transforming, and multiplying themselves. Its disciplinary mode of production has to be understood as centralized, hierarchical, monitored, and controlled. My investigation will demonstrate, that the model of its alliance between capital and nation-state continuously reproduces itself. Through a Foucauldian analysis, that demonstrates the exercise of urban social control, I will further argue that a hierarchical disciplinary society is produced within a rhizomatic control society. Utilizing the mechanism of the ‘archipelago’, the ‘disciplined normality’ penetrates the micro level but spreads further outwards. With this suggested reading of the Olympic Games’ power structure I aim to raise awareness of the complexity and the interconnectedness of the concept of participation.

Yet such an investigation concurrently produces a frightening dystopian concept of participation; both repressive and paralyzing since there seems to be no outside, or it calls desperately for participation in radical counter action. Hence, the second chapter explores again Olympic related production and participation from yet another angle. Investigation shifts toward material interstices manifested and created within a micropolitical structure, but propelled by the Olympic machinery.

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The spatial and social production on a micropolitical scale on a territory depicted as urban wasteland investigated with the concept of the ‘terrain vague’ hints quickly towards its alternative potential. Nevertheless the territory is to be understood as a biopolitical place, in which the in-between dimension of the interstices has to be unfolded. After a short introduction on the actual territory before the arrival of the Olympic machinery I start to investigate the production of the assemblage of the local neighbourhood.

It is impossible to categorise or schematise the multiplicity of projects, having a critical stance towards the Games; any attempt towards a rigidly classified mapping or an overarching subject is condemned to failure. However, I decided for a different approach facilitating my investigation towards a concept of participation, concurrently demonstrating its complexity. The common ground of the interstitial productions is that they have a critical stance towards the Games. Criticism is one of the control societies’ characteristics juxtaposing the obedience of a disciplinary society.

For the understanding of this project it is significant to investigate the projects rhizomatically since there is no final account. Hence the projects are explored in the Rhizomatic Appendix. Start reading from the middle, draw connections in- between subjects and methods, interlink ideas, reflect thoughts and test them on different projects or make line of flights. There is no systemic or hierarchical order. The investigation towards the work’s agency and participatory potential is facilitated by a simple alphabetical listing by the authors or the project’s name but intends to be understood as a non-listing.

This project then investigates interstitial spaces towards a democratic production on local territories through a variety of modes of collaborations, some democratic and rhizomatic, others authored and edited, but all contribute to a different political and urban discourse. “Contrary to the old strategies of networking, fragmenting and unifying the concatenation of diversity needs neither fragmentation nor consensus, at most a constantly renewed differentiation between power and resistance.”2 Such transerversal operations need to be investigated towards their social formation apparent in the twenty

2 Gerald Raunig. Transversal Multitudes. http://eipcp.net/transversal/0303/raunig/en [accessed 05/09/09]. 5 descriptions of the Rhizomatic Appendix: temporal alliances and reformulations. Starting from Paolo Virno’s understanding of the political in the multitude inherent to social production—since it rests upon choices one takes—I’ll argue for Nancy’s concept of singularities. Approaching being as being-with this idea disregards all forms of homogenising and unifying communalities starting but opens for an alternative understanding of sharing, communication and revisit the outlined models of participation.

The Blue Fence—a wooden construction enclosing the building site of the Olympic Park from September 2007 to June 2009—a manifestation of the neoliberal capitalist production is then the testing ground to contrast the production of the Olympic agency with a multiplicity of agencies out of the micropolitical sphere of its neighbourhood. A socio-historical comparison points towards the Berlin Wall, the contemporary reading reveals it as manifestation of the Empire: a systemic reproduction of the alliance of transnational capital, the nation state triggered by the Olympic Games. On the other side, multiple micropolitical acts are acted upon the fence: each having a very specific concern demonstrating the local impact of the fence’s sudden existence. Such strategies of undoings cannot be overestimated. It proposes an alternative social and territorial production in urban reality. There are hardly radical demands, but striking gestures and proposals towards alternatives, adaptations, escaping the tightening of the vertical grid of urban reality.

This key investigation of a rhizomatic production is to be understood as a spatial translation of flows; desire and beliefs that are at the bottom of every society. The last but significant strand of this project is the investigation in methods and means of such an alternative participatory production within the complex conditions of regeneration in the contemporary city. I aim for an schizoanalytical methodology as proposed by Deleuze and Guattari stretching “out over the dimensions of a social field that does not reclose or withdraw […]”3 Since a constantly transforming, non-hierarchical assemblage of an urban neighbourhood can produce any kind of effects (e.g. productive, destructive, consumptive, machinic, informative) such an investigation is significant.

3 Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari. Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. London: Continuum, 2003 : 306.

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To understand the employed transsectoral practices I will discuss the concatenation of art and activism. Because of its frequency the Appendix then requires an investigation of psychogeographical and archival production. Currently, collections of today’s and past stories are assembled addressing a set of questions about its participation, situatedness and framework. So the last section investigates the function and the potential of the archive, understanding it as a living Memory Box and a source for future memories.

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1.1. Modes of Participation

Participation is crucial. It enables mass-mobilisation under totalitarian regimes and revolutionary movements; the increasing spectacularisation of the Olympic Games but also the growing voices of resistance and protests. Currently we witness these struggles in Vancouver4, where the next winter Games will be held; videos and books are produced, events, actions, workshops and demonstrations on the street are regularly organized. Struggles and fights respond to corruption, displacement, land grab and increasing surveillance. On the other side, the Olympic machinery continually produces enthusiastic athletes and fans, academies and new games, most recently the Olympic Youth Games (OYG). Both operate globally yet differently: the centralised Olympic machinery calls for transnational and global activism. The protesting organisations, rhizomatically structured build temporal alliances, ranging from the Olympic Resistance Network (ORN) to environmentalists and No One Is Illegal (NOII). Similarly, academia is divided: On one side Olympic Universities far beyond the realm of sports are mushrooming5, and on the other the globally located opponents are specialized transdisciplinarily.

Participation leads to activity. Within the realm of a mega sports spectacle the boundaries are very classical and clear: either you are in the arena as athlete or on the spectator seats as onlooker. There are a myriad of different ways to blur these binary oppositions, if one wants to become part of the framework around the Olympic Games. This is significantly evident in London and options range from being a volunteer to setting up a business, from entering the Cultural Olympiad to applying for related jobs.

However, in order to investigate the concept of participation and its functions in the wider field of a democratic society the term needs to be first specified and investigated. The Olympic project was decided on a national level, so the

4 http://www.no2010.com/ 5 Robert Both. “Olympic University to be built on site of the London games.” The Guardian. 10/02/2009. http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2009/feb/10/olympic-games-london-2012-university [accessed 05/08/09]. 8 investigation of ‘participation’ needs to be directed towards the members of the state, who are called citizens. The accumulation of citizen participation might be understood as citizen power, strategically channeled and redistributed via complex machineries serving a range of different functions: political, economic, educational, cultural, ecological etc. The outcomes are manifested on a grassroots level through an enormous set of institutional infrastructures such as tax schemes, educational systems, health care centres, community hubs, police stations, public sport facilities, cultural institutions, job centres and transport networks. In short, methods and means which are supposed to ensure a smooth function of a prolific and ‘healthy’ society. Once participation is understood as a function operating as hinge to interlink systems I’d like to introduce different modalities of citizen participation.

One year after the revolutionary 1968, Sherry R. Arnstein’s model The Ladder of Citizen Participation was published (Fig. 1). 6 This much simplified typology outlining only a one-dimensional graduation between the powerless and powerholders nevertheless allows us to understand strategic and systemic operations. His category Nonparticipation summarizes the “illusory form of participation” intended either to “educate” or “cure” participants through various models of engineering support. Under attack are failures of education, health systems and its workers which effectively masquerade the issue of participation. The category Tokenism provides the potential for genuine citizen participation when going beyond “one-way communication” towards a dialogue. Its traditional methods range from consultation events to surveys, from established community advisory boards to user group evaluations. Gained information needs to be processed and fed back into the macro-political structures otherwise the activity won’t go beyond having participated in participation. The last part of the ladder can according to Arnstein be reached when “power is redistributed through negotiation between citizens and powerholders”, tackling a problem or by a dominant “decision-making authority” being handed over to citizens for a particular programme.7

6 Sherry R Arnstein. "A Ladder of Citizen Participation." JAIP. 35.4 (1969) : 216-224. http://lithgow-schmidt.dk/sherry-arnstein/ladder-of-citizen-participation.html [accessed 14/08/09]. 7 See ibid. 9

Fig. 1. !Sherry R Arnstein. Eight rungs on the ladder of citizen participation

This model calls for an investigation on how to overcome the unbalance in the lower two sections, which hosts not only power relation but power-knowledge relations. This becomes particularly relevant once investigating the Games’ call for participation in the consultation phase of urban planning as well as in their models for schooling, education and volunteering.

Architectural and urban design processes are accompanied by a whole set of consultation procedures where the so-called expert meets the non-expert. The initiated communication is penetrated with professionally coded languages and signs. Jeremy Till discusses the arising problematic at its foundation: communication, and calls for conditions of transparency so that “the non-expert will be able to engage more fully.” 8 His methodical investigation into a “transformative participation” acknowledges power and knowledge imbalances but such processes crucially call for transformation along the way, and beyond. His methodological suggestion aims not for downgrading the expert knowledge but to overcome the gap between the expert and the non-expert. It lies in the

8 Jeremy Till. “The negotiation of hope.” Architecture and Participation. Ed. Peter Blundell-Jones, Doina Petrescu, and Jeremy Till. New York: Spon Press, 2005 : 23-41 : 28. 10 recognition of the power of “urban storytelling”9. He requires the abstract expert’s knowledge to extract the stories’ actual potential and value ordinary conversations towards practical solutions. Such an approach toward mutual understanding upgrades the user and provides alternative channels beyond the constraints of expert knowledge.

I return to Arnstein’s linear model of citizen participation and its power- knowledge imbalances not looking for an alternative methodology, but trying to diagrammatically mobilize the linearity. So not to transform the ladder into an elevator or lift but into a line of flight, to propose with Doina Petrescu a schizoanalytical reading of participation, that starts with the participant’s desire, “that flees from the usual framing of a neo-capitalist architectural practice.” 10 Her ECObox project, a communal space used as a multifunctional collective garden and playground hosting various events and activities (collective cooking and gardening, lectures, discussions, cultural events), emerging through from the desire of its users. To relate this idea back to modalities of participation she proposes a fundamental structural change:

There is a difference between ‘organised participation’ which is also somehow ‘preformed’ and under control, inducing the same symptomatic reactions, and a ‘transversal participation’ (issuing from ‘transversality’ as a method) which traverses different social strata, which is neither hierarchical (vertical) nor symptomatic (horizontal), and generates unexpected and continually evolving reactions. 11

Doina Petrescu’s proposal—theorizing her practical experience with Deleuze and Guattari—shifts the participatory framework completely. The newly created micropolitical space in which governmental and local residents interaction takes place, crossing age, ethics and (non)profession further invites and attracts

9 See ibid : 37. 10 Doina Petrescu. “Losing control, keeping desire” Architecture and Participation. Ed. Peter Blundell-Jones, Doina Petrescu, and Jeremy Till. New York: Spon Press, 2005 : 43-63 : 44. 11 Ibid : 49f. Together with atelier d’architecture autogérée (aaa) the Project ECO-Urban network or ECObox was initiated in La Chapelle quarter in Paris in 2001. More: Constantin Petcou, Doina Petrescu “Au rez de chaussée de la ville” Multitude. http://multitudes.samizdat.net/Au-rez-de- chaussee-de-la-ville [accessed 14/08/09]. 11 participants through generated synergies, creating again less striatred spaces. This is not to say that such spaces are free of conflicts or tensions, but that they bear the potential to break segmentations and inform heterogeneity of power towards an alternative becoming in the social field. 12

1.2 Transformations shaping the contemporary city

A growing intensity of continuous fluxes, its transformations and the spatialization of power relations manufacture the socio-political and economic strands of the urban fabric. The contemporary city accommodates and produces an infrastructure, which enables globalised hypermobility of capital, goods, information, and people marking late neoliberal capitalist conditions; its concentration embodies the complexity of urban living. It is necessary to highlight that the term urbanisation focuses on social issues in the city; to say it with David Harvey who understands the term as a “spatially grounded set of social processes” which “produce[s] innumerable artifacts – a built form, produced spaces and resource systems of particular qualities organised into a distinctive spatial configuration. […] Urbanisation also throws up certain institutional arrangements, legal forms, political and administrative systems, hierarchies of power and the like.”13

Such interrelated processes and their power structures, which govern the contemporary city become particularly visible by implementing a mega spectacle such as the Olympic Games. The reorganisation of urban life on a distinct area mobilizes coalition and alliance formations between the public or political and private sectors towards a particular end: to disperse risk.

In England at the beginning of the 1980s urban governance changed from “managerialism” towards “entrepreneurialism” following the dynamic of

12 See Ibid : 50. 13 David Harvey. “From Managerialism to Entrepreneurialism: The Transformation in Urban Governance in Late Capitalism” Geografiska Annaler. Series B, Human Geography. 71.1 (1989) : 3-17 : 6. 12 capitalism with redevelopments—either facelifts or the improvement of quality of life for the residents—in cities such as Liverpool, Leeds, Manchester or Newcastle. Structural measures such as the creation of jobs, urban spectacles, and improvements of territorial and social infrastructures were the focus of investment.14 The speculative component produced through bidding for a mega spectacle and in the case of a successful application its subsequent implementation calls for public-private partnerships and entrepreneurialism. The initial model to compete for resources reproduces itself as the speculative bubble calls for risk management through participation. To absorb the venture, local governance as a public body aims to attract mobile multinational capital, flexible labour and consumers while concurrently searching for unique local identities, which in turn gives way to mechanisms of social control and inter- urban competition.

But generally, under the competitive conditions of the emerging Empire, the contemporary city gains importance. This emerging new form of sovereignty reveals that the power of the nation state is declining in favour of national and supranational organisms. The rising sovereignty and its governing power has three parts: 1.)Multinational (MNC) or transnational corporations (TNC); 2.)Global acting organisations, which are distinguished between: a) Government operated, non-governmental organisation (GONGO) drawing their legitimisation from the United Nations; e.g. International Money Fund (IMF), World Health Organisation (WHO), or the World Bank group;—and— b) Non-governmental organizations (NGO) such as the International Olympic Committee (IOC) or the Fédération Internationale de Football Association (FIFA); and 3) Nation state.

The centres of power lose compact geographical territory, whereas the contemporary city as a place of negotiations and manifestations of flows accumulates it in forms of information, commodities, people or capital. With such operating intensities cities attract global spectacles—political (G 8 or G 20

14 See ibid : 9f. 13 summits), cultural (EXPOs, Cultural Capital) or sports (Olympic Games, EM or WM) events—that put them once more on the world’s stage. Political spectacles require enormous security and military apparatuses, and cultural or sports mass events propel enormous regeneration developments but again, the “temporal organisation of entertainments” reveal “mechanism to discipline urban audiences”. 15 The political, juridical and economic forces in play mobilize a set of mechanisms to build and tighten the vertical grid with control, surveillance and discipline, what Deleuze and Guattari call the ‘striatred space’. The signs populate very visibly urban spaces beyond the public, semi-public or private authorities.

Empire’s conditions amplify its increasing privatisation of public spaces; stratification and segmentation enforce social division and exclusion. As Deleuze and Guattari write “The public sphere no longer characterizes the objective nature of property but instead the shared means for a now private appropriation. This yields the public-private mixes constitutive of the modern world […]”16 Such a mix currently manifests tough private control and security bodies, as well as spatial articulation of ‘defensive design and security architecture’ increasingly attached in contemporary cities. This is demonstrated in what Nils Norman calls ‘Urbanomics’17 the becoming corporation of public spaces articulated through the instalment of streetfurniture such as Anti-Urination Devices, Anti-Prostitute Devices, Anti- Skateboarding Devices, Anti-Street Vendor Fig. 2. Nils Norman. Urbanomics Archive (1997-) Devices or Anti-Sticker Surfaces. His artistic archive (Fig. 2) ironically reveals the ‘protection’ of urban public spaces masquerading its control and questions the function of the public space.

15 Ravi S. Vasudevan, Ravi Sundaram, Jeebesh Bagchi, Monica Narula, Shuddhabrata Sengupta, Geert Lovink. “Introduction“ The Cities of Everyday Life. Sarai reader. 2 (2002) : vi-ix : viii. 16 Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Transl. Brian Massumi. London, New York: Continuum,1998 : 498. 17 Nils Norman’s Urbanomics archive trailer is available on: http://vimeo.com/3199425 [accessed 14/08/09]. Further see: Nils Norman. “Urbanomics” In the Place of the Public Sphere? Ed. Simon Seikh. Berlin: b-books, 2005 : 34 -52. 14

1.2.1. Excursus: Urban public(s) and their sphere(s)

Adapted street furniture functions for regulations and ‘normalization’ installed to avoid unwanted behaviour in the so-called public sphere supporting hegemony of its users. Such devices shape the urban environment and the everyday of its users. Neoliberal and capitalist productivity (advertisement, mass media, surveillance, gated communities . . .) undermine the political and critical function of the public sphere. To understand the complexity of the public discourse, I will briefly introduce its discourse.

The Habermasian model of the public sphere emerged out of the functional interconnection between the nation state and its society rooted in the Bourgeoisie of the 18th Century. With the explosion of the print industry a political voice, different from the sovereign agency could be distributed. This development along with the spirit of the Enlightenment serves Habermas to construct the bourgeois public sphere. The mediating function has been transformed through processes of urbanisation, bureaucratisation and mass consumption and concurrently the binaries of private and public spheres intermingled. Habermas main argument, which is developed for the backdrop of the Frankfurt School analysis against mass culture focuses the degeneration of the public sphere, as it has become a platform for advertising and mass consumption rather than a place for his rational-critical debate, leading to a progressive consensus.

Such an argument towards the democratic project is strongly opposed by Chantal Mouffe and Ernesto Laclau. While they agree that the public sphere is central to the democratic processes of “public debates”, in “shaping political subjects” but also “to widen the field of democratic struggles”. Yet, the Habermasian model of deliberative democracy requires a “non-exclusive public sphere of rational argument” which for Mouffe and Laclau “is a conceptual impossibility.”18 The focal point of critique is the ‘rational’ and its empirical requirements since particularities are likely to loose and further subjectivities do not rely on their

18 Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe. Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics. London [u.a.]: Verso, 2001 : xvii. 15 rational self. Their understanding of social antagonism lies at the heart of this problem: [...] antagonisms are not objective relations, but relations which reveal the limits of all objectivity. Society is constituted around these limits, and they are antagonistic limits. [...] there is no supergame that would submit antagonism to its system of rules. This is why we conceive of the political not as a superstructure but as having the status of an ontology of the social.19 his radical shift away from a rational or objective justification used to form a consensus towards a socially grounded antagonistic struggle, bears potential for a change. However, the model of liberal democracy operates through rational debates forming a consensus in order to progress. In a truly democratic model, antagonism leads to pluralism yet the author’s model of pluralist democracy can only be understood as a model to come.

The call for pluralism is evident in the concepts of the proletarian public sphere by Oskar Negt and Alexander Kluge who responded to Habermas ten years after his publication arrived; they investigate the potential for a counter public sphere fostering the bourgeois public sphere. The authors aim to bring together the divided left and reveal the oppositional public sphere as a countermovement to a unified publicness aligning capitalism, commodification and prevailing politics. They unmask the mechanisms of the “’dictatorship of the bourgeoisie.’ This is that network of norms, legitimations, delimitations, procedural rules, and separation of powers that prevents the political public sphere […]”20 and suggests its controlled and a class interests driven character. As with Habermas the focus lies on mass media but based on social and collective experience and production processes the authors aim to leave behind the traditional academic and bourgeois spheres. The proletarian public sphere departs from “the block of real life that goes against the valorization interest”21 towards collective horizons in subcultural or proletarian contexts but offers multiple public spheres. The

19 Ibid : xiv. 20 Oskar Negt and Alexander Kluge. Public Sphere and Experience: Toward an Analysis of the Bourgeois and Proletarian Public Sphere. Theory and history of literature, v. 85. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993 : 55. 21 Ibid : 57. 16 production of this important discursive new space highlights the limits and exclusivity of the Habermasian concept and brings different voices into the fore. The Habermasian failure to neglect counter movements and social agencies to the prevalent bourgeois literary circles, namely the so-called plebeian public, who carried out the freedom of the press reveals the incompleteness when considering publicity with the hegemony of a bourgeoisie or concentrating on mass culture.22

Michael Warner (2002) developed the concept of ‘counterpublics’ emphasizing queer theory and a critical analysis of gender and sexuality. Analysing the performance of social placement Warner stresses its potential to “elaborate new worlds of culture and social relations” and “active participation in collective world making through publics of sex and gender”23. His proposed model of gendered and sexual citizenship breaks the Habermasian model once more but introduces the embodiment of their status (youth, gay or lesbian, race etc). According to Warner, what marks such a public as counter, alternative or oppositional is “their subordinate status”, not being addressed in traditional public speeches or performances, estrangement to the conditions of a common world yet productively imagining “stranger sociability and its reflexivity” apart from any membership modes.24 Michael Warner, as Negt and Kluge, founds his concept of publicness on its inherent heterogeneity, its social structures and agencies to discuss the potential of its political function. The following concept by Simon Seikh includes this conceptual work but responds to contemporary conditions of late globalised capitalism and addresses its social production.

Situated in conditions such as the post-national, the dematerialization of public spaces as well as their conflation, Simon Seikh’s term post-publics emphasizes its plural state:

22 The conference organised by Craig Calhun and the accompanying publication gives an in-depth account on critique on the Habermasian concept of the public sphere. See Craig Calhoun, J. Habermas and the Public Sphere. Studies in contemporary German social thought. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 1992 : 39. 23 Michael Warner. Publics and Counterpublics. New York: Zone Books, 2002 : 57. 24 Ibid : 118. 17

Perhaps any trans-national, or post-national concept of the public sphere can only be understood in terms of being (a) post-public, not in the sense of being after or beyond publicness as such, that we are somehow unpublic, or even returning to clandestine prepublics states, but rather a double movement of dematerialization and expansion of what could be considered public, affecting both our most local concerns and private senses of being, as well as trans-national economic flows and spaces of production and the geopolitical.25

This echoes the local concerns of the residents living around the Olympic construction sites; e.g. the globally operating NGO occupies a territory, which has been partly public before the bid was won and its machinery tightens the vertical grid impacting public spaces. The expansion of the public space might be read towards the virtual space since it has become a crucial and more democratic medium to voice alternative interests. Nevertheless, along with Paolo Virno, Simon Seikh sees the main problematic in the absence of a public sphere, “If the publicness of the intellect does not yield to the realm of a public sphere, of a political space in which the many can tend to common affairs, then it produces terrifying effects. A publicness without a public sphere.”26 The following section investigates the emergence of the Olympism and the socio-political framework supporting its growth.

1.3. The Olympic Spirit

I am always amazed when I hear people saying that sport creates Goodwill between nations, and that if only the common peoples of the world could meet one another at football or cricket, they would have no inclination to meet on the battlefield. Even if they didn’t know from concrete examples (the 1936 Olympics, for instance) that international sporting contests lead to orgies of hatred, one could deduce it from general principles…. At the international level

25 Simon Seikh. “Publics and Post-Publics. The Production of the Social.“ Art As a Public Issue: How Art and Its Institutions Reinvent the Public Dimension. Ed. Chantal Mouffe. Rotterdam: NAi Publishers, 2008 : 28-37 : 35. 26 Ibid : 36. 18

sport is frankly mimic warfare. 27

GEORGE ORWELL

The modern Games started in Athens in 1896 and it is said that the first true modern Games took place in London 1908. The French aristocrat Pierre de Courbetin, the driving force behind the Olympic Games aimed with his holistic understanding of the Olympics, to reform the educational system through sports, intending to gain both an enthusiasm for ancient Greek culture and a healthy mind and body. He pursued internationalism by inviting athletes worldwide to participate and hoped to achieve peace through sport. 28 Situating Pierre de Courbetin’s Olympism in the wider socio-political framework reveals that he was part of an emerging biopolitical movement at the beginning of the 20th Century. Foucault sets out to define biopower as “a set of mechanisms through which the basic biological features of the human species became the object of a political strategy, of a general strategy of power.” 29 This shift of production towards life through introducing sports and leisure on an institutional level—the extended arm of sovereign power—is manifested in various forms: it emphasizes outdoor activities and traveling, the institutionalisation of sports and political and economic interests towards efficacy and the strength of the body.

Throughout various regimes such body politics around the culture of sports operated in a multifaceted way and strategically empowered disciplinary and military mechanisms. This reflected and produced radical notions of modernity: industrial civilization through introduction of apparatuses for health and sports, standardization of the social field through segmentation and additional codification, orientation towards progress in technologies, economies (particularly through efficiency and rational approaches) and military power.

27 Quoted from: Shaw, Christopher A. Five Ring Circus: Myths and Realities of the Olympic Games. Gabriola Island, BC: New Society Publishers, 2008. p 1. 28 John J. MacAloon, This Great Symbol: Pierre De Coubertin and the Origins of the Modern Olympic Games. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981. 113-154. from the Chapter V ‚The Olympic Idea’ . 29 Foucault, Michel, Michel Senellart, François Ewald, and Alessandro Fontana. Security, territory, population: lectures at the Collège de France, 1977-78. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. P. 1 19

In England during the Victorian era the movement Muscular Christianity (1837- 1901) stressed physical strength and health, an energetic Christian activism, as an ideal for masculinity. It was believed that physical formation was important for the formation of the moral character. It was also around this time that sports classes were widely introduced in schools. Mass gymnastics and tourism became a tool for codification, and to gain control over public leisure. Different political regimes developed instruments to mobilize masses towards an active lifestyle industrializing popular health. In Italy Opera Nazionale Dopolavoro (1925) was the Fascist leisure and recreational organization, which primarily addressed working class people to spread its ideas. In Germany the Hitler Regime introduced Kraft durch Freude (1933-1945), which enforced an increase of holiday and a movement back to nature hiking, and traveling, lead to a boom in the tourism industry. The call for mobilisation ran through diverse social strata and juveniles became part of the ‘Hitler Jugend,’ the paramilitary youth organisation of the Nazi Party. The powerful illusion was that everyone could participate.

The ideas stress on social utility and are supported by the binding of leisure-time. Compulsory entertainment gears towards disindividualization, massification and opens sport and leisure towards commodification. The mass produced dream for individualism becomes a stereotyped appropriation; it mockingly supports the system of a unified culture with an imposed morality (voluntary work, to benefit the community, bodily strength). Moreover, such a mass production requires an enormous managing and controlling apparatus; stratafication, codification, and commodification are produced in order to function.

It is alleged that because millions participate in it, certain reproduction processes are necessary that inevitably require identical needs in innumerable places to be satisfied with identical goods. The technical contrast between the few production centers and the large number of widely dispersed consumption points is said to demand organisation and planning by management. Furthermore, it is claimed that standards were based in the first place on consumers’ needs, and for that reason were accepted with so little resistance. The result is the circle of manipulation

20

and retroactive need in which the unity of the system grows ever stronger.30

This is only a part of the assumptions Theodore W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer investigate to reveal the coherences in the growing circle of culture and leisure industries and how they demand management and control. Their argument circulates around mass mobilisation catalyzed by morality and commodification towards standardisation, control and consumption with the concept of the individual (which has never been fully achieved) in its centre.31 Most significant is the term ‘Olympic Growth Machine’ which derived from an investigation on Games situated in contemporary conditions. 32 Such a development cannot be overestimated. The Youth Olympic Games (YOG) are about to be introduced. The kick off is next year in Singapore and two years later the winter YOG are held in Innsbruck.

This manufacturing of Olympism as a global commodity is based on its ideological backdrop. The Olympic Charter states six ‘Fundamental Principles of Olympism’, which emphasize ‘universal fundamental ethical principles’ such as:

the harmonious development of man, with a view to promoting a peaceful society concerned with the preservation of human dignity [...] The practice of sport is a human right [...] which requires a spirit of friendship, solidarity and fair play. Any form of discrimination with regard to a

30 Theodor W. and Max Horkheimer. “The Culture Industry. Enlightenment as Mass Deception” Dialectic of Enlightenment. London: Verso, 2008 : 120-167 : 121. 31 The close relationship of mass sports and fascist ideas operates on many different levels: The petition issued by ‘Democracy and Dignity in Sports’ demands the resign of Juan Antonio Samaranch as Honory President of the Olympic Games (issued in June 2009.) He held important posts during the Franco regime in Spain and a photograph with him making Nazi salute from 1974 has been published recently. Andrew Jenning’s research brought it to the fore, more in: Andrew Jennings, and Clare Sambrook. The Great Olympic Swindle: When the World Wanted Its Games Back. London: Simon & Schuster, 2000. 32 Björn Surborg, Elvin Wyly, Rob VanWysberghe. Mapping the Olympic Growth Machine: World- City Networks and the Transnational Capitalist Class. http://iocc.ca/documents/MappingTheOlympicGrowthMachine.pdf [accessed 07/09/09]. This paper gives a critical in-depth sight on local and transnational synergies in Vancouver. 21

country or a person on grounds of race, religion, politics, gender or otherwise is incompatible with belonging to the Olympic Movement. 33

These fundamental principles, which are central to the games, offer a change to society proposing modes for social interaction. It functions as a pre-packaged unit to pronounce the way the games operate. Immersed in this ideological mindset athletes from all over the world are going to participate and the city of London is mobilized to create a welcoming atmosphere and a lasting legacy benefiting the local community while exposing London onto the world’s stage.

1.4. The Olympic Machine

The great industrial and financial powers thus produce not only commodities but subjectivities. They produce agentic subjectivites within the biopolitical context: they produce needs, social relation, bodies, and minds – which is to say, they produce producers. In the biopolitical sphere, life is made to work for production and production is made to work for life. 34

MICHAEL HARDT AND ANTONIO NEGRI

Having briefly introduced Olympism which is put forward to represent the Olympic Games, and also situated Olympism in the wider framework through which it emerged I will now progress to analyse its actual production. Founded in 1894, the IOC is organising their thirtieth Games in London; they have a long tradition of acting as a global NGO. This leads to approach the IOC as a power centre operating globally: as franchise cooperation for massive social and territorial regeneration (e.g. 1988 in Seoul and 2008 in Bejing, and currently on a large scale in Vancouver and London).

33 Fundamental Principles of Olympism. The Olympic Charter. In Force as from 7 July 2007, p 11 (online) 34 Hardt, Michael, and Antonio Negri. Empire. Cambridge: President and Fellows of Harvard College, 2000 : 32. 22

As a centralized and unified body the IOC distributes power from the global to the local, overriding, utilizing and submerging into existing power structures, and a new body of Olympic agents begins to operate. The process of designing the territory for a global spectacle requires re-appropriation of power on various local nodes whose agents in turn translate and transform again, spreading power themselves. This design process incorporates both, territorial and social production. Power is exercised from a central node which starts to instrumentalise existing structures to reproduce and multiply itself in vertical, top-down hierarchies. The IOC as a power centre does not rely on a fixed territory, but exercises its power globally. Each time the Olympic Games—in summer as in winter, and also starting from next year onwards the Youth Olympic Games—are situated in a different location. The IOC operates as a de- territorialized apparatus, yet functiones as a centralized capitalist imperial machine.

Capital is an enormous productive power and as with the Olympic Games, it aligns with the state-apparatus for its reproduction. Within their framework of thinking Deleuze and Guattari put out a reciprocal hypothesis through the power relation between the state, the city and capital. “[I]f it is the modern State that gives capitalism its models of realization, what is thus realized is an independent, worldwide axiomatic that is like single City, megalopolis, or ‘megamachine’ of which the States are parts or neighborhoods.” 35 This axiomatic logic between the governing forces and money flows articulate in the contemporary city. Such a relation could be explained with the logic of nationalistic politics and its need to armor territorial and air spaces.

As the capitalist and Olympic production unfolds a surveillance industry starts to operate, creating new kinds of boarders shifting towards biopower and crucially impacting on identity politics (e.g. creating social exclusion, producing social order), producing an armed fortress around its construction and spectacle site. On the other hand, capital undoes boundaries e.g. legal—the introduction of further laws and regulation or sovereign—the introduction of a new minister, but re-segments spaces for the worse (e.g. as seen in Beijing.) This complex production pushing and pulling different power relationships and propelling

35 Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Transl. Brian Massumi. London, New York: Continuum,1998 : 480. 23 continuous multiple productions is what I attempt to investigate. The idea of the machine is not to be understood as a metaphor or reduced to a technical function but rather as a complex operating apparatus which structures, includes and divides different elements such as people, things, capital or information and thus transforms or produces them.

In his Excursus on Machines Gerald Raunig maps the philosophical concept of machines, which was newly formulated in poststructuralist thought by Deleuze and Guattari; but before, it was put to work and further developed by Karl Marx and in post Marxist theory (Deleuze and Guattari even call it proto machine). 36 Marx understands it to optimize exploitation in labour efforts inclosing knowledge and skills of workers into the production process of capital concurrently producing “new workers’ strikes and protests, as capital confronts them not only with direct repression but especially with new machines.” 37 After investigating contemporary capitalist production in London, the tools provided by Marx are limiting once read against the backdrop of the emerging Empire and its complex, simultaneous production incorporating the production of subjectivites. Deleuze and Guattari acknowledge the Marxist axiomatic function of capitalism “because it has no laws but immanent ones” 38 which subordinate flows with mechanisms of powercentres, but they are limited.

Every society is based on flows, which are beliefs or desires with no collective signifiers. Deleuze and Guattari develop a whole circuit of machines referring to a productive nature with its function related to flows. It goes beyond a technical machine, but as a “functional ensemble” operates with a set of components such as “material and energy”, “semiotic, diagrammatic and algorithmic,” and “individual and collective mental representations and information” aiming for production. 39 I attempt to grasp those interrelations and the modes of production, which are situated within capitalist production.

36 Gerald Raunig and Aileen Derieg. Art and Revolution: Transversal Activism in the Long Twentieth Century. Los Angeles: Semiotext(e) Active Agents series. 2007 : 138-149. 37 Ibid : 140. 38 Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. London, New York: Continuum,1998 : 514. 39 Felix Guattari. “Machinic heterogenesis” Chaosmosis: An Ethico-Aesthetic Paradigm. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995 : 33-57. 24

1.4.1. Winning the bid

For each host city the Olympic machinery starts to operate way before the city authorities decide to become part of the bidding procedure.40 Besides impressing bid books, whole constellations of mechanisms and power structures are behind such a procedure. In 2001 two phases of election were required to finally announce Beijing as the host of the Games. Yet, concurrently, China had to promise to improve their dodgy human rights records, freedom of the press, and environmental standards. Worldwide, these promises fuelled hopes and desires for a change of social and environmental conditions and the repression of Tibet yet these promises were never met. Under Communist dictatorship, the Games were intended to represent China as an open harmonious superpower, but conditions worsened. one point five million million people were evicted, an unknown number forcefully so, and images of systematic tortures and so called ‘black prisons’ revealed only some aspects of the violent regime.41 Yet what I attempt to map is the neo-liberal capitalist production in the framework of what is called a westernized society using the Olympic Games as a vehicle.

On the 5th of July 2005 in Singapore it was announced that the bid was won, and with it the rebirth of East London for the estimated cost of nine billion GPB. 42 From that very day as Tessa Jowell (who became British Olympics Minister) urged, “there is no day to lose”43, the Olympic machine began to operate for London. The Olympic agency has allied with the state apparatus; the Olympic

40 An excellent in-depth view how it the driving political and economical forces behind Vancouver pushed and pulled different strands to massively impact the real estates markets and tourist industries delivers Christopher A Shaw. Five Ring Circus: Myths and Realities of the Olympic Games. Gabriola Island, BC: New Society Publishers, 2008 : 1. 41 Unreported world. China's Olympic lie. directed by Andrew Carter. Quicksilver Media. Channel 4, 2007. 42 Since this investigation is maps the Games’ operation, please refer to the timeline at the back in order to gain a rough overview on the Olympic schedule of operations and events but also on general important news and related (counter)events. Period: July 2005-August 2009. 43 Tessa Jowell, in: Building the Olympic dream. Part 3. produced by Rachel Coughlan & Min Clough. BBC. 2008. 25

Board was set up and the Olympic Ministry was created. This marks not only the initiation of an additional striation of space but also predetermines the exercise of authority with the hierarchical structure attributed to it. ‘Power centers obviously involve rigid segments. Each molar segment has one or more centers.’ 44 These rigid molar segments can here be read as supported by the three state powers: the executive, legislative and judiciary power, which will be mobilized and put into operation through the alliance. I will now explain how this can be understood.

In October 2005 the London Organising Committee of the Olympic Games and Paralympic Games (LOCOG) as a limited company owned by the government was formed to continue the work of the bidding team; this body, chaired by Sebastian Coe is responsible for successfully staging the games. Based in Carnary Wharf, this nodal point crucially signifies the moment where economic powers come into play. The committee creates contracts, educates volunteer, supervises the Cultural Olympiad, and locates monetary resources from private sectors through sponsoring, merchandising or broadcasting rights. Yet, climbing down the ‘public’ ladder the Olympic project operates through combining forces of a strong group of twenty-eight key stakeholders. 45 As a side strand, further born out of the Olympic alliance with the state apparatus was the Olympic Park Regeneration Steering Group (OPRSG), which was set up in May 2007. Now chaired by the Mayor of London and the Olympic Ministry it seems to act as a strategic tool and a coordinative and communicative body among the five host Boroughs negotiating socio-economic aspects in their neighbourhood. Its project London Calling, launched by the mayor at the Beijing handover celebration, invites proposals for the urban park’s legacy after the Games from around the world, to support the London’s LegacyNow46 projects. 47 If and how these projects

44 Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Transl. Brian Massumi. London, New York: Continuum,1998 : 247. 45 e.g. LDA, ODA, the five host Boroughs (Greenwich, Hackney, Newham, Tower Hamlets and Waltham Forest), London Thames Gateway Development Cooperation, Lee Valley Regional Park Authority or the central government. 46The ‘LegacyNow: Gains beyond the Games’ project is run by the LDA and is a “merged architecture and urbanism team” operating as a consultation and developing body the project hosts public consultations and processes into socio-economic strategies for the host Boroughs 26 can be translated remains an open question, since the “LDA may choose not to use any proposal submitted.” 48

However, what is produced here is enormous institutional machinery, bound in economic and socio-political structures. Such nodes of systemic operation, which either use old command structures, vertically top-down and at a certain point opening horizontally, reproduce the applied mode of operations and translate the applied strategies. As a result it empowers and informs the same power- knowledge imbalance.

1.4.2. Mobilizing judiciary power

If absolutely nothing else in this book takes hold, remember this: !The Olympic Games at the local level are all about real estate. 49

CHRISTOPHER A. SHAW

The decision to regenerate an area is a macropolitical one and here a catalyst acts for transformation. The Olympic driven regeneration hits areas considered as deprived or brown-field site, once hosting manufacturing industries. Yet the area north of Lea Valley where the Olympic Park is situated has been undergoing major developments. It is positioned between Stratford City with its newly opened shopping centre, Westfield, and further planned redevelopment processes over the next 15 years with the Channel Tunnel Rail Link (CTRL) project providing major infrastructural nodes connecting the North East of London. Nevertheless, the site has seemingly appeared as a classic frontier territory. Even before the Games procedure started, speculative forces and agencies had invested in the cycle of buying, demolishing, designing and building.

concerning the post-games life of the park. It was announced that in September a new semi-public organization will take over. http://www.legacy-now.co.uk/. [accessed 30/08/09]. 47 Press release Mayor seeks 'wow' factor for London 2012's legacy. 21/08/2008. http://www.london.gov.uk/view_press_release.jsp?releaseid=18418 [accessed 14/08/09]. 48 Deadline was the 21/11/2008. http://www.2012londoncalling.co.uk/proposal.html. [accessed 30/08/09]. 49 Christopher A Shaw. Five Ring Circus: Myths and Realities of the Olympic Games. Gabriola Island, BC: New Society Publishers, 2008 : 5. 27

However, the 580 hectare site of the Olympic Games had to be acquired, and this process started immediately. Part of the landowner is the Lea Valley Park Authorities and 306 hectare had to be purchased by the LDA, funded by a direct grand from the government. Exposing details during public hearings opposing the Compulsory Purchase Orders (CPOs), the Guardian titled its account “Full steam ahead for Olympic land grab”. The initial 400 objections fell, as many agreements were reached, despite 30-40 serious objections. After acquiring 94% through negotiations, the LDA arrived to issue two CPOs. 50 It is not about the number of issued CPOs but about operating molar segments, which are mobilized by a capitalist force revealing a totalitarian nature to override the existing structure of democratic principles. “CPO powers are granted to local authorities and other public bodies to enable them to assemble land required for major regeneration projects where there is a compelling case in the public interest.” 51 The LDA as public body and operator for the Olympic Games acts as a platform to bring this case to the High Court, where the objections have been heard. The question to place here is the definition of the public interest, which is then to be decided by the juridical power. The employment of such mechanisms deconstructs any claims of ‘social inclusions’ immediately as they have been undone and instead produces the impoverishment of the poor.

The Games operate on an international level. The Centre on Housing Rights and Evictions found out that, “In every city it examined, the Olympic games - accidentally or deliberately - have become a catalyst for mass evictions and impoverishment. Since the 1988 Olympics in Seoul, more than two millions people have been driven from their homes to make way for the Olympics.” 52 I mentioned already the one point five millions brutally and forcefully displaced in Beijing. In London 425 residents, 35 traveler families, 206 businesses, the Clays Lane Estate, and the Manor Garden Allotment Society, were evicted or relocated.

50 See Andrew Culf. “Full steam ahead for Olympic land grab.” The Guardian. 9/09/06. http://www.guardian.co.uk/sport/2006/may/09/Olympics2012.politics. [accessed 30/08/09]. 51 http://www.lda.gov.uk/server.php?show=ConWebDoc.1731. [accessed 30/08/09]. 52 George Monbiot. “London is getting into the Olympic spirit – by kicking out the Gypsies. “ The Guardian. 12/06/07. http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2007/jun/12/comment.Olympics2012. [accessed 30/08/09]. 28

The Allotment Society have to keep campaigning since their requirements where not met. The dislocation of the Newham travelers on a converted community playground has lead to disintegration on the new site. The functioning social unit of the Clays Lane Estate is dispersed and for many the housing situation has been impaired. The latter two went through the process of a public hearing and to the high court where both cases have been lost.53

In the same year, most significantly the London Olympic Games and Paralympic Games Act 2006 was released. The critical point of this legal tool will be investigated in the Chapter Maintaining Public Order.

1.4.3. In Search for a Legacy

Aiming for a ‘sustainable Olympics’ with a long lasting legacy the Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR) and the independent think tank DEMOS submitted a related report. In 2004 it proposes sustainable social, employment, environmental, sporting and cultural legacies. Such a broad agenda based on previous Games, projected onto London crucially calls for strategies which hit the ground cross-sectors ‘to bring together and secure a better interaction between physical and social infrastructure […] it will be vital to embed the Olympics within broader programmes and policy agendas that start well before 2012 and continue well afterwards.’54 Proposed strategies orient strongly towards a ‘people’s games’ embedded in various communities to propel the vast legacy agenda, which coincides with the democratic principle of participation. Here we are at issue to explore biopolitical strategies and mechanisms, which are mobilized to shape and transform lives. And it is exactly this call for participation, central to westernized capitalism, which makes the question of participation so timely and points to an exploration of its implemented strategies.

53 See ibid. The LDA has spent about £750m on acquiring the land, paying disturbance costs and buying sites outside the Olympic zone to relocate businesses; this costs aroused additionally to the £2,375bn public-sector funding package. 54 Melissa Mean, Anthony Vigor and Charlie Tims. After the Gold Rush. A sustainable Olympics for London. London: IPPR and Demos, 2004 : 132. 29

Besides being in charge of providing and clearing the Olympic site, and relocating its residents and companies, the London Development Agency (LDA) as a business-led board subject to the Mayor of London, has to ensure Games’ legacy and London’s economic growth. In November 2005 the LDA announced an initial £9 million funding package55 to support employment, skills and the creation of jobs in the run-up to the 2012 Games. In February 2006 the London Employment and Skills Taskforce was generated to plan a series of initiatives to deliver the legacy of skills and employment benefits from the 2012 Games, and three years later the Business Guide56 distributed by LDAs Public Liaison Unit, bearing the logo of its first umbrella, LegacyNow, started to operate. The offered services target micro enterprises centre on three topics: Access contract; Improve your business; Develop your workforce. These newly operating institutional nodes are (partly or fully) publicly funded and camouflaged with different names: LDA, the public sector, or as governmental service.

Capitalism here produces with the support of the state apparatus complex hierarchies of interrelating structures, what Deleuze und Guattari would call ‘molar segmented lines’. Functioning as vast administrational, communicational and educational machinery it massively reproduces and multiplies itself. Such a generated concatenation of elements negates any autonomous function, as one or more new power centres can be located in every instance. Algorithmic components and diagrammatic functions generate codes and norms regulating economical growth concurrently communicating a clear power-knowledge relationship to its institutional outside. Such structures, which are simultaneously deeply economically and politically embedded, pull these two threads. Let me give here the example of the Olympic Delivery Authority (ODA), which was established as a public body by an act of parliament in March 2006. Such a body obviously triggered by the Olympic agency, and now working jointly with the state apparatus, operates to transform and multiply its Olympic power. Its vast advisory network consists of a board and the committees supporting its function. Recruited key figures are horizontally drawn and represent major

55 Press release. http://www.lda.gov.uk/server.php?show=ConWebDoc.1301 [accessed 30/08/09]. 56 LegacyNow: Gains beyond the Games. What your business needs to know: a business guide. London: Public Liaison Unit, LDA. March 2009. http://www.legacy- now.co.uk/userfiles/file/Business%20brochure.pdf. [accessed 30/08/09]. 30 positions in politics, regeneration and urban development, finance, infrastructures, education, constructions, major cooperation, tourism or culture. A complex conglomerate of knowledge, information and energy produces a horizontal synergy that channels, redistributes and exercises power vertically in the established vertical structures.

London has embedded the games in wider social and territorial regeneration strategies coining the term ‘regeneration Games’. After the Games’ end a two- year transition period is suggested, in which the Olympic venues are converted and the strategically planned Legacy Masterplan Framework (LMF) will start to operate. The response to my inquiry regarding housing and studio options for the artistic population revealed a strict segmentation and division of responsibilities and was directed towards consultants of the fringe masterplan.57 These additional masterplans are propelled and catalysed outside the Olympic Park in the host Boroughs.

However the LegacyNow project additionally acts as an educational body working through different social strata: the ‘LegacyNow Lecture Series’58 at Universities the ‘LegacyNow School Consultation’ in which young people masterplan the Olympics. Outside the educational institutions the LegacyNow Youth Panel (LNYP), which is active on Facebook, develops soundscapes, writes manifestos, and crucially one of the projects outcomes is to support the reduction of gang crime (likely in this area because of London’s postcode policy), to make the area safe for 2012. Referring back to capitalist production, participatory models, and to Arnstein’s ladder, the offered strategies find themselves oscillating between categories of nonparticipation and tokenism. This fortifies imbalances in the power-knowledge relationship, and bears the danger of only producing attendees who have ‘participated in participation’. Social production is an important part of this project, and the following excursus investigates it very closely.

57 See Appendix. My e-mail conversation with Rebecca Haves, LDA from 12th of May 2008. 58 http://www.legacy-now.co.uk/education/ 31

1.4.4. Excursus: Exercising Urban Social Control

[T]he social refers to a particular sector in which quite diverse problems and special cases can be grouped together, a sector comprising specific institutions and an entire body of qualified personnel (“social” assistants, “social” workers). We speak of social scourges, from alcoholism to drugs; of social programs, from repopulation to birth control; of social maladjustments or adjustments, from predelinquency, character disorders, or the problems of handicapped to the various types of social advancement59

GILLES DELEUZE

It is intended that the Olympic Games work for the benefit of the local community, through education and social projects. The models of the illustrated mechanisms, which support micro businesses or the consultation and mobilize for the LegacyNow project, are currently also operating for London’s Cultural Olympiad as well as for sport as such. The Olympic machinery employs the systemic function of education, schooling and volunteering60 to produce a disciplinary power enforcing a disciplinary society within the control society. So one faces an anachronistic development, a centralized structure grows within the rhizomatic, intended to control social urban space, which reveals an instrumentalised participation, done to people. A set of techniques infiltrates first existing power structures, and then following Michel Foucault, adjust and multiply “the apparatuses of production“; including the production of knowledge, skills, and health. 61 Here, the manifestation and multiplication of the disciplinary power of the Olympic Agency arrived via institutions and recruited educators at a micro level; it distributes through participatory modes of institutionalized training and schooling.

59 Gilles Deleuze. “Foreword. The Rise of the Social.” The policing of families. By Jacques Donzelot; transl. from the French by Robert Hurley. New York: Pantheon Books, 1979 : ix-xvii : iv. 60Within Boroughs the councils are currently developing institutions and facilities to train and educate 50,000 volunteers which will support the Games, not only through the six weeks but also the set-up and de-installation; so volunteers become an enthusiastic, skilled and supportive power structure. 61 See Michel Foucault. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. London: Penguin Books, 1991 : 219. 32

The production of urban social control functions through a vertical mechanism described by Foucault’s concept of a disciplinary society following three criteria: “firstly, to obtain the exercise of power at the lowest possible cost”, here, through volunteers and their enthusiasm, “secondly, to bring the effects of this social power to their maximum intensity[...]”, here, through the promotion of a healthy lifestyle, schooling and following the Olympic spirit and “thirdly, to link this ‘economic’ growth of power with the output of the apparatuses [...] within which it is exercised;” meaning here the inclusion of the produced agents into the Games to secure fluent procedures and economic profit. The disciplinary power structure enforces “[...] both the docility and the utility of all the elements of the system.” 62 Moreover!! Foucault highlights that power should not be regarded as repressing, hindering or stopping developments but as a productive force.

As exemplified, the disciplinary power of the Olympic Agency produces a set of institutions, which might be identified in their mode of operations with what Foucault calls “carceral archipelago”63. The spread of a net (first throughout the five host Boroughs and then throughout London, and later including other venues in the rest of England) with “compact institutions” moves further outwards with “separate and diffused methods, assumed responsibility for the arbitrary” and techniques to foster the threat of delinquency.

The disciplinary power transmits the disciplinary norms and produces rules to tighten the grids of the striatred space of the city. So the nature of this social mobilisation is networked between the Boroughs as a governmental institution with the centralized power of the IOC jointly penetrating the independent landscape of freelance workers on a micro level. By offering a platform to work and create new projects new compact institutions emerge. An archipelago effect produces compact institutions following a pyramidal scheme driven by enthusiasm in the name of the Olympic spirit. Significant social units such as the Clays Lane Estate, two traveller sites and a number of allotments have been destroyed in London. In exchange a network of compact institutions, which introduce a ‘disciplined normality’ forms and spreads further and further

62 See ibid : 218. 63 Ibid : 297. 33 outwards. The network reaches a disciplinary mechanism functioning throughout society.

The mechanism of the archipelago enables the transportation of the Olympic spirit from its centre to the entire social body, following Foucault, with important results: - It reveals how institutions are linked together. - It recruits and organises careers and as it includes voluntary work, the ‘outside’ diminishes, since it takes back what it seems to exclude. - Its pyramidal structure operates on every level of the social body proposing its ‘normal’ character. - This structure further supports the distribution of the ‘normative power’ enforcing surveillance, observation and coding. - It produces the knowledge this form of power needs to operate, which helps to explain the solidity of the Olympic Games. - Its strategy of power is linked to the state apparatus and to cooperate brands. Hence, its social production combines economical and political strategies. 64

What is implemented in the society of control is an “intensification and generalization of the normalizing apparatuses of diciplinarity that internally animate our common and daily practices“65 as outlined above. This is further signified through reducing its institutionalisations by way of implementing its codes, rules and functions directly into society; e.g. change of banking practices such as online banking, cash withdrawal in foreign currencies, payments can be made in 24/7 stores; Distance Learning Courses at Open Universities, sentences which are not served in prisons but on social work.

The Foucauldian analysis exemplifies the production of normalizing apparatuses employing a systematic static power-knowledge relationship. One might refer to the operation of power as flexible and fluctuating by producing the apparatuses yet where the power meets the trainees, children or students the relation is fixed. Urgently, this Foucauldian analysis requires us to re-define the meaning of

64 See ibid : 298-307. 65 Hardt, Michael, and Antonio Negri. Empire. Cambridge: President and Fellows of Harvard College, 2000 : 23. 34 the term “social” away from any general and nostalgic meaning of a supportive, welcoming, non-corporate structure and rather redefining it towards its operative and regulatory mechanism. It alarmingly aligns Gilles Deleuze’s understanding quoted at the beginning of this section. Another idea aligning with the understanding of the social, which needs to be investigated in the context of the Olympic Machinery, is the notion of the community since the Games call for participation for the benefit of the community.

1.4.5. Excursus: Unravelling the Community Myth

The concept of community is regularly brought forward to counter the tendency of alienation in contemporary society, which is informed by an anonymisation of individuals and their increasing self-centred behaviour triggered by competitive conditions. So, it seems that the nostalgic place of community could be used to restore the decline of values and its associated increase of violence and criminal acts. But the microtexture of a contemporary city reveals the heterogeneity of its inhabitants on social attitudes such as ethics, age, professions, desires as well as political stances. The problem with community, which is characterised as a uniformed common, is that it is mainly defined by its communality implying the urge of its hegemonic appearance and not foregrounding on differences. Moreover since the term is overly used in economical and political rhetoric, particularly when it comes down to local authorities addressing the area’s residents and concurrently suggesting that a community is something given. Besides the problematic of its precondition to be united, the ambiguity of the community concept lies in the idea of a single, unique subject, which is drawn into this uniformed common and herewith loosing its autonomy as being.

What Nancy calls the lost community refers to communities in a past and their agencies—strong social bonds supported through their rituals and representation reflected in a communion autonomy, intimacy and unity—along the lines of projected nostalgia. Such communities are constituted of values such as sharing, love, brotherhood, and operate with strong identification on the level of equalities and well-balanced power. Nancy targets the consciousness, that operates constructing those images and in tracing Western history he unfolds them

35 anchored in Christian tradition66, longing for immanence and transcendence, or in the more secular example of the joint suicide of lovers. Throughout history dissolved or absorbed in community and ideological desire people have experienced suppressions, barbarousness, and death in the name of salvation or a community never to come. Consequently, demonstrating the immanence beyond death as the immanence of death leads Nancy to arrive at the superficiality of this consciousness and a constantly recurring mourning.67

Yet Nancy sets out to deconstruct the term community and makes it a community of unworking and undoing to define a non-communitarian understanding of community. This means his community is not signified by the communal but rather its resistant elements; essentials such as its participants, the political within the communal, which refuse such a unification of a communion within a defining spirit. He approaches community away from hegemony and vertical structures, operating from top down. Unfolding being in a way that “being is in common” he arrives at community as a “being in common” rather than community conceived as a unity. In a proposed single perception community looses the in so that being-in-common transforms into being common and herewith giving way to hegemonic structures and tendencies towards totality and universality.68

The Communist idea on community failed on many levels, and Nancy clarifies that his idea of community cannot derive from work as it did back then, since such an understanding implies the idea of a making, a forming and leading to its possible reduction to an object. But “community necessarily takes place in [...] ‘unworking’ [...] before or beyond work, withdraws from the work, and which, no longer having to do either with production or with completion, encounters interruption, fragmentation, suspension.”69 Therefore it is not the common work or labour, which creates communality but signs of resistance to become a united common being, so Nancy’s community is not about a common-being but as he

66 See Jean-Luc Nancy and Peter Connor. The Inoperative Community. Theory and history of literature. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001 : 9f. 67 Nancy brings examples such as a joint suicide of lovers or Nazi Germany. See ibid : 12f. 68 See ibid : xxxix. 69 Ibid : 31 36 puts it, about a being-in-common.70 Disturbances, malfunctions, ruptures are a motor for critical reflections and suggest to undo communality from within to then create another mode togetherness. This emerging structure of being together shifts emphasise from the community as united entity towards its conditions, the being with, stressing relations amongst singular beings. It is exactly this space in-between singular beings where the interest of this project, different forms of participation, comes in. Participation involves the other or others to interact, to communicate, and to act upon a situation and often it is resistance or other forms of undoing, which require addressing within participatory structures.

1.4.6. Maintaining Public Order

Fashioned largely by economic forces, the economy of intelligence was a multidiscursive and ‘multidirectional’ force that created ideological cohesions between ideas of capitalism, the new nation state, the scientific method, and the social value of applied material technologies. These collaborations not only produced new ways of knowing the world but began their institutionalization. 71

PAUL MICHAEL PRIVATEER

Through its operations the Olympic spectacle communicates and produces a tightening of the vertical grid in the hosting urban spaces. Particularly the fight against terrorism generates multiple mechanisms of control orders, most recently in Beijing. The issued Anti-Terrorism Manual for its citizens ran the whole gamut of shootings to nuclear attacks, and rewards from £730 to £36,600 were also offered for reporting substantial information on security threats. 72 To restrict entry to China was one strategy employed by armed security forces, paramilitary officers or counter terrorist police, to ensure and maintain public order or one might say, another tactic to avoid protesting against the Games or

70 See ibid : 29. 71 Paul Michael Privateer. Inventing Intelligence: A Social History of Smart. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2006 : 26. 72 Tania Branigan. “China issues anti-terrorism manual for Olympic games.” The Guardian.18/08/2007. http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/jul/18/china.terrorism. [accessed 1/08/09]. 37 drawing attention to the living condition of ordinary Chinese people. Such security strategies operating on a global scale produce fear, resentment and terrorism at the same level. On the other side, events as the Munich massacre (1972), the bombing in Atlanta (1996) and the 7/7 bombing in London are to be considered. The Olympic agency requires the suspension of the norm, which is deeply grounded at the time of my writings when there are still are three years before the opening ceremony.

Already a two-week research period from 7th of July to the 21st of July 2009, in a public medium such as a daily newspaper, The Guardian, hints towards different strata considered as a threat. It reveals set of juridical, political and executive powers, and towards a whole security industry and its enormous costs.

The current threat level, as announced by the Home Office is “substantial - an attack is a strong possibility” one which London’s residence already used and a certain level of fatigue has been reached. The Metropolitan Police constantly alerts the public with counter terrorism advertising attached hotlines. However, in the run up to the Games, £19m has just been released from the contingency funds to fight against terrorism and to modify Olympic venues. The Anti-Terror Police collaborate with the Serious and Organised Crime Agency (SOCA) who covers the whole range from laundering criminal profits, drug dealing, sex trafficking or importing illegal firearms. But furthermore, the Home Office has been requested by Scotland Yard to provide financial support to prevent fraud carried out by cyber-criminals as well as international criminal networks targeting e-crime. 73

To add another dimension and to manifest the employment of artificial intelligence, I quote from ODA’s press release. To ensure safety and security the electric perimeter fence enclosing the Olympic Park construction site will be amplified by “access of control systems [...] including a state of the art biometric system for quick identification checks, such as facial or hand shape

73 Sandra Laville. “Cyber-criminals preparing to target London 2012 Olympics, police warn.” The Guardian. 8/07/09. http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2009/jul/08/cyber-criminals-london-olympics [accessed 1/08/09]. 38 recognition.”74 In the name of rationality, safety and security biometric data are collected and various exercised strategies of intelligence shift the apparatus further towards biopolitical strategies produced by the conglomerate of economy, science and nation-states functioning. But moreover the rootedness in the intelligence apparatus is what draws here the control society together, it is also and very interestingly the exercised ‘learning’ on the social field and so the introduction of further codes and rules, which slide into the everyday.

The Metropolitan Police Authority (MPA) have voiced concerns since: “Evidence from previous games suggests that the large visiting Olympic workforce can lead to an increase in demand for prostitution … and an increase in trafficking” e.g. during the Games in Athens human trafficking increased at 95 %. Thus the Metropolitan police has secured £600,000 to work with a specialist unit in the five host Boroughs, prosecute human traffickers, operate “proactive” and run “training workshops in schools, youth clubs and colleges.” 75 This very clearly demonstrates that the Games will not only initially provide jobs, but produce a concatenation of demands in the service and security industry. Again this puts us back into the control society scheme, where social workers are called to correct, prevent or to cure behaviours.

The last of my findings concerns not the executive tightening of the vertical grid but protest to its juridical preparations. The London Olympic Games and Paralympic Games Act 2006 released by the Office of Public Sector Information brought the civil liberties group, civil rights activists, and opposition parties into the arena since:

Section 19(4) could cover protest placards, they said, as it read: ‘The regulations may apply in respect of advertising of any kind including in particular – (a) advertising of a non-commercial nature, and (b) announcements or notices of any kind.’ Section 22 allows a ‘constable or enforcement officer’ to ‘enter land or premises’ where they believe such an

74 Press release 4/07/08. http://www.london2012.com/news/media-releases/2008-07/olympic- park-security-set-to-increase-as-construction-intensifies.php [accessed 1/08/09]. 75 See Sandra Laville. “Met Police clamp down on sex trade in five Olympic host Boroughs” The Guardian. 19/07/09. http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/jul/19/sex-trafficking-2012- olympics-london. [accessed 1/08/09]. 39

advert is being shown or produced. It allows for materials to be destroyed, and for the use of ‘reasonable force’. The power to force entry requires a court warrant. Causing still further concern is a section granting the powers to an enforcement officer appointed by Olympic Delivery Authority.76

The authorities’ response so far is conciliating, and taken towards ambush marketing and not towards restricting protests, or political placards. Yet considering that there are still three years to go and taking a glance at Vancouver, where the requirements of the IOC results in repression and most likely to preventative arrests, one might be advised to harbour doubt.77

The Games instigate this transformation of provisional and exceptional measures towards a state of emergency and herewith enforce the biopolitical significance of power exercised onto life, signaled in the limitations to the democratic right of voicing resistance and protest. These executed despotic acts of regulatory power employed in exceptional circumstances significantly conflict with regulations in democratic constitutions. The paradox is that the strategies in place prepare a global sports festival masqueraded as a huge party, lasting up to six weeks but a whole set of surveillance and monitoring apparatuses increase in the name of safety and security which will remain as an additional legacy.

76 Vikram Dodd. “Police powers for 2012 alarm critics” The Guardian. 21/07/09. http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2009/jul/21/olympics2012-civil-liberties. [accessed 1/08/09]. 77 Close to the Vancouver’s construction site Christopher A. Shaw had to undergo a random identity check by police officers lasting for 40 minutes and a short video further states his concerns about the increase of surveillance mechanism particularly targeting activists and people exercising civil rights, which will in turn make it difficult to protest against the Games. He is Professor of ophthalmology at the University of British Columbia and author of Five Ring Circus. The video can be found at http://www.gamesmonitor.org.uk/node/832 40

2. 1. The Micropolitics of the Interstices

The first part of the project investigated and demonstrated the operation and production of the centralized Olympic machinery. Particularly the Foucauldian analysis outlined its productions on a micro scale, a hierarchical and submissive disciplinary society. The second part centres on this micro scale and the every day. It interrogates first losses on the current Olympic territory by mapping its inscribed urban geographies, its physical and human geography—not to romanticize it but to investigate the potential for possible alternatives apart from a homogenised, futuristic, segmented and controlled city space driven by this global spectacle. This chapter will focus on the rhizomatic potential which of the transitional phase to propose a different urban reality.

Before the territory became the construction site of the Olympic Park it was populated by the Manor Garden Allotments (RA#12)78, a British institution with more than a hundred years of tradition having more than 80 plot holders, 430 residents in the Clays Lane Estate, a fully mutual housing cooperation for ‘vulnerable’ and single people, 400 University of East London Students and 35 traveler families (RA#17). Ninety-five firms have been registered. 79 The area was also home to Hackney’s biggest landmark, a 20m towering fridge mountain, more mountains of car tyres and an uncounted number of abandoned, vandalized cars. Iain Sinclair, the Hackney based psychogeographical writer, filmmaker and a leading figure campaigning against the Olympic Games writes:

Hackney once again topped the list: it’s official, according to this morning’s radio statisticians, we are the worst borough in London for car crime. License dodging. Petty theft. Taking without the owner’s consent. Which is

78 Their stories are told in the Rhizomatic Appendix, to which the numbering refers. 79 Smith, Carolyn. Games Monitor Background Paper 1: Impact. n.p. http://www.gamesmonitor.org.uk/files/BriefingPaper1-Impact.pdf [accessed 05/09/09]. 41

pretty encouraging, I felt. The more cars are taken the better our chances of surviving another day. Best practice: remove and destroy. 80 These few sentences voice a significant outside perception of an as deprived depicted area and the proposal of anti-capitalist subversion in response, hints towards the complexity of the site’s character. Yet such a conservative and destructive pub politics rooted in the past revives a dangerous and easy subversion. The activation of ideas and memories is required, and their transformation towards the better.

Ignasi de Solà-Morales Rubió’s concept of ‘terrain vague’ unfolds the ambiguities of the industrial wasteland as a magnet to artistic practices or urban recreational area. “Unincorporated margins, interior islands void of activity, oversights, these areas are simply un-inhabited, un-safe, un-productive. In short, they are foreign to the urban system, mentally exterior in the physical interior of the city, its negative image, as much a critique as a possible alternative.” 81 These margins in the fabric of the contemporary city have another function: they bear surprises, serve memory, convey nostalgia, and concurrently offer potential for alternatives away from constraints. These “spaces of uncertainty” offer the potential of “immediate kinetic energy that celebrates the missing”82 beyond nostalgia, for transformations yet to come, and grasp contemporary tendencies beyond a simple targeted public user group and fixed definition. Abandoned industrial buildings and old warehouses are converted for alternative use such as artists’ studios or squats. Hackney still holds the highest population of artists as the Rhizomatic Appendix tries to demonstrate. Yet, their ephemeral in-between residencies are echoed in the temporal life of their graffiti. As part of a political expression they call for attention from the passer-by. The most popular have been protesting the colonization by the Olympic Games stating ‘fuck Seb Coe’ or ‘no bid no games’ but have been whitewashed by graffiti removal troops in good time before the IOC arrived. Yet one has to draw a bigger picture of the Olympic site.

80 Iain Sinclair. Hackney, That Rose-Red Empire: A Confidential Report. London: Hamish Hamilton, 2009 : 439. 81 Ignasi de Solà-Morales Rubió, “Terrain Vague.” Anyplace. by Cynthia C. Davidson, New York, N.Y.: Anyone Corp, 1995 : 118-123 : 120 (Italics by the author) 82 Kenny Cupers, and Markus Miessen. Spaces of Uncertainty. Wuppertal: Müller + Busmann, 2002. Bookcover inside blurb. 42

Hackney Marshes and open public areas of Lower Lea Valley functioned as a recreational site for local sports from running to horse riding and canoeing and other collective sports. 83 It functioned as a plural, open, heterogeneous site without any built high-tech facilities, serving as a real inclusive arena for heterogeneity and setting different dynamics in motion. The performances and social gatherings of the artist collective Pudding Mill River (RA#16), which have been harvesting and processing the wild fruits of the Lower Lea Valley highlight this small gap for micro uses which is now closed. The Lower Lea Valley and the Hackney Marshes operate as public space (yet are semi-publicly owned by the Lee Valley Regional Park Authority). A long historical tradition binding together Lammas Land and the Eton Manor Athletics Club is inscribed in Hackney Marshes. The related traditional community activities are currently displaced yet the fear that they—as well as the land—are forever lost is permanently present.84 The forfeiture of such an historical site, including its biodiversity, instigates further estrangement in contemporary cultural reality informing the alien status of public life and empowers the redrawing of a completely different map. However, macro political forces do consider such spaces as non-productive and empty. Consequently regenerative developments start to operate and master planners are commissioned to feed them into efficient and productive city structures.

On the other hand such urban vacancies bear a strong potential. The population of these coexisting different spaces do not follow the logic of capitalism, and produce subjectivities exposed to different but complex struggles, common desires and collective dynamics so that future projects can emerge. Such alternative spaces created through negotiations, on transitional places or within loopholes in the normalizing apparatuses are surrounded by notions of interstices. An ephemeral agency informs and produces significant interstices representing “resistance to normativity and regulation, to homogenization and appropriation” allowing “a glimpse of other ways of creating a city that are open

83Smith, Carolyn. Games Monitor Background Paper 1: Impact. n.p. http://www.gamesmonitor.org.uk/files/BriefingPaper1-Impact.pdf [accessed 05/09/09]. 84 88 Lammas Land was registered as common land. See ibid. 43 and collaborative, responsive and cooperative.” 85 Interstices point towards coexisting spaces within a set of codes, rules and norms, which allow certain flexibility and bear surprises informing alternative practices. Antonio Negri points out:

the interstice represents an essential dimension, because it allows one to single in on a space that is precisely ‘in-between’, which demands that one confront the problem of different languages and link between them, or that of a power relation (the biopolitical exploitation of life) and force (the resistance that is expressed in the experimental practice of an interstitial space).86

And it is exactly this interstitial space with complex power relations and multiple languages where this project situates its second part. It operates on the fringes of the Olympic machinery and investigates responding projects critically exploring its operations, which it tries to undo. It is not the intention of this project to mourn significant losses, but rather to actively investigate the current local interstitial productions.

Along with Doina Petrescu and Constantin Petcou’s project ECObox, which I have already introduced with the model of transversal participation, an interdisciplinary research programme on the activation of temporary urban interstices was launched. Their investigation focused not on the global space of international activism but rather on a “small-scale biopolitical space where the ‘average’ inhabitants can meet each other and reshape an every day life that they control to the extent possible.” The biopolitical space can be understood as the diagram where the “reproduction of organised life (social, political) are controlled, captured and exploited”87 in all its forms: the circulation of goods,

85 Pascal Nicolas-le Strat. “Interstitial Multiplicity.” Urban-Act: practices, groups, networks, workspaces, organisations, tools, methods, projets, data & texts. [Paris]: Atelier d'architecture Autogéré, 2007 : 314-319 : 314. 86 Anne Querrien, Doina Petrescu, Constantin Petcou. “What Makes A Biopolitical Place? A Discussion with Antonio Negri.” Urban-Act: practices, groups, networks, workspaces, organisations, tools, methods, projets, data & texts. [Paris]: Atelier d'architecture Autogéré, 2007 : 290-299 : 290. 87 See ibid : 291f. 44 money, information, the increase of policing, monitoring and surveillance towards regularisation and normalisation as well as the institutionalization of activities. Mechanisms of command and control penetrate the social body, operating on all social strata. The interstitial of the terrain vague bearing the potential for local micro power to be developed, as mentioned above has diminished conversely with the progress of the Olympic Games on the territory. During the phase of transition different in-between spaces are negotiated and created, have emerged and found expression, debate and discourse beyond activism or contemporary artistic projects. In the following I will investigate the production of these conglomerates of different practices and productions, struggles, resistance and alternative proposals, which are described in the Rhizomatic Appendix.

2.2. Manual to the Rhizomatic Appendix

Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of the rhizome is often visualized as the World Wide Web since it allows for heterogeneity in which any point can be connected with any other. The potential of interconnectivity lies “between semiotic chains, organizations of power and circumstances relative to the arts, sciences and social struggles.”88 Hence, this Appendix encompasses sources denying any overarching category such as artistic works, social projects, activist platforms but stresses their decentred interrelatedness remaining non-genealogical. The rhizomatic structure provides the model to map such a multiplicity on different projects, their agencies and affects anchored in the everyday to than their rhizomatic growth.

Various projects on the micropolitical level critically investigate the Olympic Machinery; they reveal incidents within their operating systems, campaign to change their mode of operations, produce affects, propose alternatives, aim to interrogate or subvert macrostructures, redraw the map of coexistence, inhabit in-between spaces during the period of transitions or adapt existing structure according to necessities. The interrogation in each single project’s agency further

88 Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Transl. Brian Massumi. London, New York: Continuum,1998 : 8. 45 maps their social formations in different stages of the process: autonomous, collaboratively, intermingling, collectively and acting as a singularity. In the following I investigate again modes of participation which concurrently address the question of social formations.

Significant is that the employed methods such as walks, workshops, discussions, exhibitions, self-organised activist collectives, Internet platforms, publications, and talks have a different framework, away from constraints of the controlled and monitored Olympic macrostructures. The production drives away from mass production and massification commanded by a centralised apparatus and towards multiplicity and heterogeneity; there is no single logo, no unified issue but multiple and diverse concerns.

Jermey Tills proposal of ‘transformative participation’ undoing knowledge-power asymmetries through urban storytelling is manifested in various forms. Vast collections of local stories are generated through artistic practices (psychogeography, archiving, film) and then processed to make them transversally available. The mainstream media hardly reported the story of the Manor Garden Allotment Society (RA#12) yet the case got attentions from alternative channels and gained support: artistic projects, exhibitions, films, magazines etc. The work by Thomas Pausz Revisiting the Community Shed (RA#14) filled a gap, lacerated by capitalist productions, its command structures and exclusivity. Apart from the shed, the handmade artist publication in its DIY aesthetic acts as a reminder and is distributed through exhibitions, which herewith act as another node to distribute alternative knowledge. Gerald Raunig discusses the significant concatenation of art and transversality.

Transversality is a poststructuralist concept by Foucault, Deleuze and Guattari developed out of psycho- and schizo analyses yet never fully developed: “Transversality is the transference become vehicular.”89 Gerald Raunig’s conceptual discussion states: “Transversality—as Guattari explained in 1964—is intended to overcome both dead ends: the verticality of the hierarchical pyramid and the horizontality of compulsory communication and adaptation.” It “accelerates the spatial regulation of the geometrical concepts of horizontal and

89 Gary Genosko. “Introduction.” The Guattari Reader. Blackwell readers. By Felix Guattari and Gary Genosoko. Oxford, UK: Blackwell Publishers, 1996 : 1-34 : 15. 46 vertical” and “develop[s] constellations that are a-centric” and move “right through points in new directions”, those transversals “do not necessarily even cross, lines of flight, ruptures, which continuously elude the systems of points and their coordinates.”90 This oscillating relation between coexistence and hybridisation is made very precise in Gerald Raunig’s reading of the transsectoral nature of art and it is worth quoting his argument in full length. It interlinks

social struggles and artistic interventions and theory production and ... This AND is not to be understood as haphazardly stringing together random elements to cover up contradictions, as a political propaganda display of social fields, but rather as a multitude of temporary alliances, as a productive concatenation [...] it does not work like the gluttonous inclusion mechanism, which generates a freedom from contradictions in the insatiable apparatuses of political parties through imperatives of conformity, nor in the style of the mainstream of attac, as a hybrid of Greenpeace and unions, greedy for members on the one hand, but on the other very clever in founding sections. The division of the movement into economic policy, agricultural, artistic, feminist, etc. "sub-unions", the limiting of respective specific competencies to the clichés of their subsectors (for instance, the [self-] limitation of artists to illustrations or recruiting celebrities) are exactly the opposite of the additive function of transversality. Contrary to the principle of delegation according to a division of labor, transversal lines pose a praxis of traversing.”91

Various modes of transsectoral operations are, if in place, described at the end of each project description in the Appendix and I’ll discuss this transsectoral production of at the end of this chapter. To investigate its required temporal alliances, I refer once more back to the initial chapter on participation and Doina Petrescu’s proposed transversal model, away from controlled and preformed patterns under conditions arranged by macro political powers. She focuses micro political spatial conditions supporting the transgression and participation to

90 Gerald Raunig and Aileen Derieg. Art and Revolution: Transversal Activism in the Long Twentieth Century. Los Angeles: Semiotext(e) Active Agents series. 2007 : 205. 91 Gerald Raunig. Transversal Multitudes. http://eipcp.net/transversal/0303/raunig/en [accessed 05/09/09]. 47 multiple social strata for an alternative becoming. Out of the Appendix I can identify such models particularly in the event structure of the Wick Curiosity Shop (RA#10), Grunts for the Arts (RA#9) and their alternative Games, Jean- Francois Prost’s open platform of Adaptive Actions (RA#1), the interdisciplinary event We Sell Boxes We Buy Gold (RA#3 / RA#19), and particular the Allotment campaign and its related events bear a significant potential for transversal participation. Further events such as screenings on the Blue Fence propose its adaption might be read as alternative action (no entrance fees, collaborative programming) attempting to create a positive tension in the local urban reality. These open projects offer collaborations and participatory strategies transgressing a simple agglomeration of projects or events. Each of these projects but also its in-between stages acts as a node for collective reformulation and further temporal alliances for alternative production.

2.2.1. Excursus: Social Formations

The argument of this project develops from the backdrop of the rising Empire. Hardt and Negri provide us with a concept for the investigations of counterproductions, alternatives and modes of resistance to its growing global power: the multitude. In 2004 their book on the multitude and Paulo Virno’s on the same subject—Negri and Virno come out of the tradition of Italian autonomia deriving from operaismo—have been released proposing two different approaches. The concept focuses on its inherent heterogeneity and difference whereas the ‘mass’ bears notion of unification but it also different to the Marxist working class. Hardt and Negri say that “[T]he multitude is a creative and resisted force of change, having the potential to move the world beyond the brutal logic of capitalism.”92 According to them it is characterised by biopolitical production struggling to move away from all forms of capitalist exploitation and control longing for authentic democracy beyond the concept of the nation state and liberation on a global scale. As a powerful creative force and as response to imperialism “[T]he multitude called the Empire into being”93 and is “capable of

92 Michael Hardt and Antoni Negri, Multitude : the end of capitalism. produced & directed by Louise Wardle. BBC. 2003. Quote from the film. 93 Hardt, Michael, and Antonio Negri. Empire. Cambridge: President and Fellows of Harvard College, 2000 : 43. 48 autonomously constructing a counter-Empire, an alternative political organization of global flows and exchanges.” 94 Yet reading through Empire where the concept of multitude develops one sees clearly Sylvère Lotringer’s point saying “Their real purpose is to jump-start the revolutionary machine. They quote Spinoza: ‘The prophet produces its own people.’ They want to produce their own multitude, but they are not exactly sure it will work.” Whereas “The ultimate goal of Virno’s inventive inventory is “rescuing political action from its current paralysis.” 95

Virno’s argument comes out of the philosophical tradition of the terms as people and multitude developed by Hobbes and Spinoza in the 17th Century and his rethinking of it under the contemporary condition of post-Fordist production. He attempts to redefine ONE not as the nation state but in “language, intellect, the communal faculties of the human race. The One is no longer a promise, it is a premise”96 and offers different approaches to start to think many-as-many. Interesting for this project is Virno’s repositioning of the political subject. It becomes inherent political by shifting it from the public realm towards labour production exemplified through the concept of the acting virtuoso “a performance artist” and activities finding its “own fulfillment (that is, its own purpose) in itself, without objectifying itself into an end product”, and an “activity which requires the presence of others”.97 Virno shifts of the political with collaborations and communication towards labour production, also beyond cultural production to “to the totality of contemporary social production.”98 On the other side, Hardt and Negri’s understanding of the political in the multitude is far more specific: “the action of the multitude becomes political primarily when it begins to confront directly and with an adequate consciousness the central

94 Ibid : Foreword xv. 95 Sylvere Lothringer. “FOREWORD: We, the Multitude.” A Grammar of the Multitude For an Analysis of Contemporary Forms of Life. By Paolo Virno. Los Angeles, CA: Semiotext (e), 2004 : 7- 19 : 16. 96 Paolo Virno. A Grammar of the Multitude For an Analysis of Contemporary Forms of Life. Los Angeles, CA: Semiotext (e), 2004 : 25. 97 Ibid : 52. 98 Ibid : 66. 49 repressive operations of Empire.”99 The match to this revolutionary and resistant request is the work of the transnational operating Olympic Resistance Network, ORN.

However, the investigation of this project is focused on systemic functions and not on a single group formation but tries to understand the operation in its plurality. The self-organised models of collective production involve artists, intellectuals, authors, designers, activists and practitioners beyond their classical categories as well as local residents. The notion underpinning such production is not necessarily a radical form of resistance to the spatial politics executed by the Olympic Machinery but a manifestation of multiple struggles and partly an undoing of its impacts. These involves to some extent a shared ground, common aims, collective ideas or joint property; it is a coming together to share space, time and thoughts. The conditions providing the capability to share require first the other before matching parameters as communality or affluence and rises questions to what extent sharing can create a communion. Nancy argues that beings are “constituted by sharing [...] that makes them others” and unfolds “in the ecstasy of the sharing: ‘communicating’ by not ‘communing’.”100 It is vital to understand that sharing does not unite or submerge beings but defines them in their singularity and informs their changing roles. Nancy suggests not a pre-supposed shared ground but the act of sharing as a mode of distributing, dislocating and communication.

To understand these rhizomatically acting agents I would like to introduce Nancy’s concept of the Singular since it can only be regarded within a plurality of other singularities. Deriving from “Latin singuli means ‘one by one,’ and is a word that exists only in the plural.”101 The singular is drawn out of the coexisting plural and so bears notion of its plurality. This process of singularization signifies one amongst others and herewith relates the singular to the plural through its way of emergence. Quoting Nancy otherwise “[...] if Being is being-with, then it is,

99 Hardt, Michael, and Antonio Negri. Empire. Cambridge: President and Fellows of Harvard College, 2000 : 399. 100 Jean-Luc Nancy and Peter Connor. The Inoperative Community. Theory and history of literature. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001 : 25. 101 Jean-Luc Nancy. “Eulogy for Melée” Being Singular Plural. Stanford, Calif: Stanford University Press, 2000 : 145-158 : 156. Italics by the author 50 its being-with, the ‘with’ that constitutes Being; the with is not simply an addition.”102 The singular as a being-with can only co-exist, which makes the crucial difference to the idea of the individual, capable to exist on its own. It is still able to keep its autonomy by only relating to others and neither submerging into a higher being nor subordinating to a communal identity. Nancy demonstrates that questions around Being are essentially questions of being- with. The conceptual question that arises addresses its outside: If the singular is plural, how can there be an external viewpoint of being-together and can such a plurality provide a place to speak from? Who is the ‘we’? How to think questions of community and its sovereignty as both a ‘with’ and refusal?103 The manifestation of struggles between those two opponents is mapped in the following section.

2.3. Undoing the Fence

Following the logic of this project, the departure from the position of the binary opposition, the investigation in the Olympic agency calls for a counterpart. The focus of this exercise is the most significant spatial manifestation drawing London and the Olympic Games together is the Fence: an icon of exclusion, surveillance and non-communication. By contrasting the Olympic agency and the agency of its counter-projects I aim to underline the significance of the rhizomatic production. The fence is to understand as a reproduction of the alliance of neoliberal capital and the state.

The Olympic Park site was closed off by the 10 feet tall and 11 mile long wooden Blue Fence in 2007 and in spring 2009 this landmark was replaced by a 5000 volt high wired fencing. Already the first walling called for alarming responses. Bryan Finoki’s essay Imperial Blue posted on the blog Subtopia. A Field Guide to Military Urbanism the interrogates security strategies, theatricality and the merchandising characteristics of the “nomadic fortress ” coloured in artificial

102 Jean-Luc Nancy and Peter Connor. The Inoperative Community. Theory and history of literature. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001 : 30. 103 Ibid : 33-38. 51

“imperial blue.”104 The New Statesman already predicts, that “[t]he fence may become a focus for protest against the ODA's failure to engage”105 whereas Blueprint asks “[...] why is that public being made so unwelcome?”106 and consequently commissioned the Office for Subversive Architecture to design and install a viewing platform.

The highly monitored and electric fencing around the Olympic Park separates the construction site from the rest of the London.

Situating this division in a wider socio-historical context, one draws quietly a parallel to the Fig. 3. Worldwide Partners on the Fence. Berlin Wall, separating its west from the east. In the early 1970s Rem Koolhaas explored in his essay Field Trip the meaning and potential of the Berlin Wall approaching it as architecture and not as a border. This allowed him to undo and reveal its different levels such as its epiphanies - beauty and horror, its communicative functions, importance, mass and possible mutations. “Also, the wall is not stable; and it is not a single entity, as I thought. It is more a situation, a permanent, slow-motion evolution, some of it abrupt and clearly planned, some of it improvised.”107 He understands the walling as performative and ephemeral serving different functions, but constituting a situation. So what situations does the fence constitute once investigating its micro- and its macro angle?

What distinguishes the fence significantly from the Berlin Wall is its response to late capitalist and neoliberal conditions. Partly the fence mutates towards shiny

104 Bryan Finoki, “Imperial Blue.” Subtopia. A Field Guide to Military Urbanism. September 2007 http://subtopia.blogspot.com/2007/09/imperial-blue.html. [accessed 3/07/09]. 105 Owen Van Spall. “Behind the big blue.” New Statesman.19/06/2008. http://www.newstatesman.com/society/2008/06/olympics-2012-fence-blue-oda. [accessed 3/07/09]. 106 Vicky Richardson “Opening Shot” Blueprint. Aug. 2008. 269 : 18-23 : 18. 107 Rem Koolhaas “Field Trip.” S M L XL: OMA. By Rem Koolhaas and Bruce Mau S.l: [s.n.], 1993 : 212-234 : 219. 52

Fig. 4 Master Plan and National Support. Fig. 5 Children Doodles.

branded advertisement boarding representing an assemblage that oscillates between branding, legacy aims, and children’s doodles. The billboard functions to demonstrate the global-scale of the event and promotes the world’s leading supra national brands as worldwide partners (Fig. 3.) and English based corperations as official partners and various signage convey public support. The inclusive logo of the London Games operates with a similar rhetoric as the imagery of the clean and futuristic legacy plans (Fig. 4). Next to it, ambitious legacy images with their aims written in eco-friendly green and children doodles (Fig. 5) underline the all- inclusive call for participation and the communities’ benefit. Clearly, this reading of the fence aligns with the global condition of the emerging Empire, understood as a tri-partite power force between state apparatus, tansnational corperations and NGO governing the world. Koolhaas analyses the full spectrum of the Berlin Wall from cross-border festivities to the fact that the wall was lethal. Since I have already discussed the applied security strategies108 I proceed with the multiplicity of micro acts acted upon the Blue Fence exploring alternative strategies of engagement, interrogate its rhetoric and underline the loss of the urban site, officially depicted as urban wasteland.

An investigation of artistic actions elaborates a variety of impacts on the micro- scale dealing with the conditions of the sudden existence of the Blue Fence. Although what these works rhizomatically and significantly draw together is a reworking of the fence, a set of micro strategies of undoing: adaptations,

108 See section 1.4.6 Maintaining Public Order. 53 dispersal, subversions or inhabitation. Mark Wayman’s East London Border (RA#19) activates different imaginations through subversion by asking his participants not to imagine the site without the Games. Stephen Cornford (RA#2) inhabited interstices and concurrently fosters mechanism of surveillance. Jean- Francois Prost All Aboard (RA#1) gestural performance underlines the difference between materiality and its set of operations attempting to undo regulating conditions. Gesche Wuerfel 2070 B (RA#20) adapts an existing structure and transforms it into a different object. Silke Dettmer’s Postcard from the Cyan Edge (RA#5) undoes the ephemeral nature of graffiti by placing her work into the gallery and calling the audience to participate in its distribution. Futher, the ephemeral existence of the blue walling provoked a different kind of tourism, walks and events. Multiple micro behaviours emerged independently, acted upon the conveyed rhetoric, and proliferated along the perimeter to propose different situations. Yet macropolitical urban reality demands a designated purpose: separation, surveillance and the execution of discipline as well as urban order.

2.4. Transsectoral practices

The texture of the Rhizomatic Appendix emerging out of the micro scale is molecular, ‘something quite different yet complementary’109 to the Olympic project; it is in contrast to the molar segmented line of the Olympics not ‘overcodable’ and emerged out from the fringes of the Games in response. In the following I won’t extract artistic practices but rather try to read the responses to transforming conditions of social realities. These micro-actions acted on an urban local neighbourhood during the process of gentrification employ multiple different methodologies and each time address a very specific issue.

Driven by micropolitical struggles acting out or even inhabiting interstices these practices foster an unlearning of current norms, codes or rules and initiate different processes, producing alternative knowledge. What draws those practices together is its multiplicity and heterogeneity, which outlines

109 Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Transl. Brian Massumi. London, New York: Continuum,1998 : 240. 54 differences, losses, and the overruled marginal segments, opposing any notions about unification and homogenisation or syntheses. So we find a criss-cross on practices not only between the projects but also in different projects. The ephemeral spatial interventions, which highlight and address transformation, operate in public or semi-public spaces or channelled into the public sphere for a debate. Yet, it would be completely wrong to state, that all these works are about protest. Some practices simply recognise urgent matters of the superstructure’s failure and collaboratively resolve them. Archives as a tool to work around notions of memory and change is frequently addressed. Voices of resistance, criticism, protest but also related anger, anxieties and worries are there to be unpacked.

2.4.1. Concatenation of Art and Activism

The activist is not someone who becomes the brains of the movement, who sums up its force, anticipates its choices, draws his or her legitimacy from a capacity to read and interpret the evolution of power, but instead, the activist is simply someone who introduces a discontinuity in what exists. She creates a bifurcation in the flow of words, of desires, of images, to put them at the service of the multiplicity’s power of articulation; she links the singular situations together, without placing herself at a superior and totalizing point of view. She is an experimenter.

MAURIZIO LAZZARATO110

When thinking of resistance, protest, producing ruptures or discontinuity underlining social and economic asymmetries in the circuit of neoliberal capitalist productions the term activism crosses ones mind. The Appendix demonstrates—most significantly in the work by Grunts for the arts (RA#9) or Richard DeDominici’s Torchrelay (RA#4) —activism as an artistic method to respond to situations by taking action and challenging the exclusivity of the Games in a DIY mode. The actions are not massive disruptions establishing fundamental oppositions but rather foster mechanisms and ceremonies of power relations by addressing a very specific issue.

110 Maurizio Lazzarato quoted from: Brian Holmes. “Network, swarm, microstructures.” Multitudes http://multitudes.samizdat.net/Network-swarm-microstructure [accessed 13/08/09]. 55

The interrelation of art and revolution, the active artistic participation in social struggles has with Gustave Courbet and his engagement in the Paris Commune (1871) its earliest and most prominent example.111 The practice of activism emerged out of the Russian and French Revolutions at the beginning of the 20th Century and amplified again in the protests of 1968, in which resistance challenged the governing power relations evident in Marxism-Leninism and the Bourgeoisie. Art was mobilized on both sides: empowering the governing system and its hierarchisation, structuralisation and segmentation (e.g. Socialist Realism in the east and the Third Reich Art, Neue Sachlichkeit in the west) as well as producing and supporting its ruptures and voice protests (Dadaism, Feminist and Queer art, Situationist Internationals, Viennese Actionism); a biopolitical shift of art towards action and life moves it decidedly away from commodification. Artist struggled for art’s disentanglement from representational political functions or institutional instrumentalization. Emerging from a micro scale, revolutionary and artistic practices (e.g. pamphlets, posters, performative actions) submerge reciprocally informing, processing, and forming components of the complex revolutionary machine.112

Michel Foucault’s theoretical body of work on power developed against this background of the turbulences in 1968. It investigates various types of power and its systemic functions producing social control through apparatuses of automatization and disindivudalisation. His analyses of the exercise of power provided powerful models for the struggle of resistance113 which is to be understood in its multiplicity juxtaposing homogenising and unifying powers. Activism as such started as literary phenomena prevalent in Germany in the circle around Kurt Hiller. Walter Benjamin pictured the bourgeois left-wing

111 The discourse around art and social change or art and activist tendencies cites Gustave Courbet as its avater eg. Gerald Raunig and Aileen Derieg. Art and Revolution: Transversal Activism in the Long TwentiethCentury. Los Angeles: Semiotext(e) Active Agents series. 2007 : 20. Or Will Bradley “Introduction.”Art and Social Change: A Critical Reader. Ed. Will Bradley and Charles Esche. London: Tate Publishing, 2007 : 12. 112 See Gerald Raunig and Aileen Derieg. Art and Revolution: Transversal Activism in the Long Twentieth Century. Los Angeles: Semiotext(e) Active Agents series. 2007 : 47. 113 Walter Benjamin. “The author as Producer.” The New Left Review. I.62, July/August 1970. http://roundtable.kein.org/files/roundtable/Walter%20Benjamin_%20The%20Author%20as%20P roducer.pdf. [accessed 13/08/09]. 56 intellectuals contributing to class struggles through political literary criticism that he repositioned as counter revolutionary. His analysis of their production— in solidarity with grassroots struggles thus supportive and well intended towards counter political artistic forms—disclosed the transformation of “the struggle against misery into a consumer good” for the bourgeoisie. He reformulates the role of the revolutionary intellectual writer as merely determined by ‘mediated solidarity’ through techniques of reproducing, adapting and engineering, as the intellectual cannot leave his/her position.114 Nevertheless, in a transversal production the Foucauldian heterogenic understanding of resistance requires diverse social strata operating on all levels of production leaving no way to escape from responsibility.

In regard to the Olympic project it is interesting to discuss the platform Games Monitor (RA#6) for the background of transversal activism not in regard of radical actions but of the mode of operations. Operating on urgent global issues currently manifest in London the self-organised democratic platform acts transnationally drawing people transsectorally together. Significantly “in those struggles which are consciously prefigurative, in which the struggle aims, in its form, not to reproduce the structures and practices of that which it struggled against, but rather to create the sort of social relations which are desired.”115 This productive network for protest proposes concurrently an alternative structure (non-hierarchical, non-representational) and functions as a node for exchange and knowledge production, as research resource, as meeting and protest place, and monitoring tool, concurrently offering support and advice. Their engagement with situations in immediate urban reality emphasized on social and territorial production demonstrates another, quite regularly applied method mapped in the Appendix.

114 John Hollaway quoted after Raunig. Gerald Raunig and Aileen Derieg. Art and Revolution: Transversal Activism in the Long Twentieth Century. Los Angeles: Semiotext(e) Active Agents series. 2007 : 42. 115 Guy-Ernest Debord. “Introduction to a Critique of Urban Geography.“ Les Lèvres Nues. 6 (1955). http://library.nothingness.org/articles/SI/en/display/2. [accessed 13/08/09]. 57

2.4.2 Psychogeographical production

Psychogeography could set for itself the study of the precise laws and specific effects of the geographical environment, consciously organized or not, on the emotions and behavio[u]r of individuals.

GUY-ERNEST DEBORD116

Guy Debord and the Situationist International made major radical contributions towards social transformation by introducing the concept of the situation and the event in the discourse on art and politics. They coined the term psychogeography as a set of techniques used to explore urban and suburban geographies and their imprinted social articulation; it operates as a critique of capitalist production with the aim to transform the city. Centring on human sentiments, psychogeography oscillates between urban landscape and the individual exploring affects on both ends and a set of methods manifest its findings. Circulating around different practices (visual and soundrecordings, photography, drawings, texts etc) to map the actual reality of city the dérive— walking as “a technique of rapid passage through varied ambiances”—functions as its core element, involving a “playful-constructive behaviour and awareness of psychogeographical effects[...]”117 Employed as a method it reveals ruptures in urban textures on the micro scale of the neighbourhood. It centres on diagrammatic explorations “following its own logic and with its relations with social morphology”118 informing readings of multiple perceptions. The praxis of détournement, either the subversive modification of popular propaganda material or the displacement of its signs, codes or slogans, as a widespread “parodistic methods”119 and functions as a tool to urban and systemic critique on social realities.

116 Guy-Ernest Debord. “Theory of the Dérive.“ Internationale Situationniste. 2 (1958). http://library.nothingness.org/articles/all/all/display/314. [accessed 13/08/09]. 117 Ibid. 118 Ibid. 119 Guy-Ernest Debord and Gil J. Wolman. “A User’s Guide to Detournement.“ Les Lèvres Nues. Transl. Ken Knabb. 8 (1956). http://www.bopsecrets.org/SI/detourn.htm. [accessed 13/08/09]. 58

Acting as a very flexible toolbox enforcing participatory strategies psychogeographical methods are widely employed to address urgent issues around the Olympic projects. In his voyage of discoveries Iain Sinclair120 collects local histories and transcribes his legendary neighbourhood conversations with artists, barbers, gangsters or bomb-makers into his documentary fiction. The constant negotiations and the author’s subjective analytical reactions operate to uncover hidden values of the territory’s cultural realities. The work acts as an enabler to the reader to access the complex and multifaceted ephemeral relation with the psychic and physical urban landscape even though Sinclair turns the experimental psychogeographical praxis into a subjective rather historical method.

Laura Oldfield’s drifts offer immediate and direct engagement to decipher the spatial articulations of the interacting aspects of local social mechanisms. The walks as collective actions open potential of synergies. What the Situationist International define as détournement empowers her visual practice—the collages in the fanzines as well as most significantly in opposing the official legacy propaganda for 2013 in her London 2013 Drifting Through The Ruins (RA#13)— the distinct critique on contemporary urban social policies. Stephen Gill’s photographic work Archaeology in Reverse (RA#8) draws not on the mediated Olympic messages yet on the first ephemeral activities and left markers of the announced transformation. The juxtaposition of these elements implemented in the neighbourhood with its nostalgic remnants of the ‘terrain vague’s’ last days crystallizes the fleeting relationships of coexisting collective mechanism, away from disindividualisation, feeding memories and expectations.

The multilayered work Broken Trajectory (RA#3) by Richard Crow, which might be referred to as psychosonic, is distributed through various alternative but local channels. This sensible choice of placement amplifies the works political potential transgressing the activation of memories through the sonorous resonance of the voices but unfolds a political potential on a micro level. Further, the soundscape is ‘displayed’ without visuals so the attention is utterly drawn to the act of listening; the audience is subject to listening. These parameter of the work’s situatedness aim toward a collective yet heterogeneous memory of the

120 Iain Sinclair. Hackney, That Rose-Red Empire: A Confidential Report. London: Hamish Hamilton, 2009. 59 site and the audience’s collective listening might be regarded as the works agency towards notions of a collective becoming.

2.4.3. Building future memories

He who controls the past controls the future; and he who controls the present controls the past.121

GEORGE ORWELL

Many projects are explicitly concerned with the significant task of collecting, documenting, preserving and producing knowledge around local changes catalysed by the Games. Certainly, it will become a historical event, an official grand narrative and a ‘public memory’. The task of breaking a single history is approached through building collections and archives of contemporary material serving not only generations to come but holding capacities to capture and voice a myriad of transformations accelerated by time and the event. Susan Pui San Lok’s Faster Higher (RA#11) draws various archival and contemporary materials together. She revisits, edits, and assembles the official Chinese footage and through including her newly material shot she breaks this linearity proposing an alternative reading. This points toward the archive’s powerful potential.

Jacques Derrida indicates the struggle by stating, “Nothing is less reliable, nothing is less clear today than the word ‘archive’”.122 The semantic of the term proposes the juxtaposition of commencement following principles of nature or history and commandment following the rules of law.123 Derived from Freudian psychoanalysis Derrida rethinks this concept and its inherent tensions what he negotiates to be archive fever: the archive’s operation—holding records, which act as signifier—reveal the complex of translation and hermeneutics, acknowledge its necessity beyond nostalgia and the quest of origin. It questions

121 George Orwell. 1984. London: Penguin Books, 2003. 122 Jacques Derrida. “Archive Fever. A Freudian Impression” Diacritics. 25. 2 (Summer, 1995) : 9-63 : 57. 123 See ibid : 9. 60 authenticity or truth and concurrently oscillates between private and public spheres.124 This complex set of issues constitutes notions of the archive as a homogenous unity of a multiplicity compounded in a non-hierarchical heterogeneity of each in its records. The archival production of documentary evidence captures and generates unique events and integrates them into discursive systems. What is at stake in this project, since the method of archiving is applied in various projects, is not so much the interrelation between concepts of truths but the authority generating the archive. First I investigate what is at stake in the practice of archiving itself.

Buchloh’s investigates Richter’s Atlas and Warburg’s Mnemosyne-Atlas, both are vast archives built to address the cruelties of Fascist Germany. Warburg’s collection starts when he anticipated the Fascist impacts and Richter generated his collection retrospectively. Buchloh states: “While collective social memory, according to Warburg, could be traced through the various layers of cultural transmission […] Warburg more specifically argued that his attempt to construct collective historical memory would focus on the inextricable link between the mnemonic and the traumatic.”125 As a method, the archive as well as the memory can be revisited and are employed to approach traumatic experiences relating back to Freudian psychoanalytical practice. This suggests a strong reading of the mobilization of archival practices to revisit local testimonies triggered by the urban spectacle.

More of interest might here be to investigate the idea of a collective or a public(s) memory. The archival production addresses a set of questions: what to collect or generate, how to classify or taxonomy, what is its technical support structure and its exposure but also scrutinizes the collecting authority. Particularly artistic or collectively assembled archives aim to generate counter-memories and alternative knowledge. For the Olympic Games public bodies, museums or academic institutions officially undertake the significant task of archiving along with independent artist collectives.

124 See ibid : 57ff. 125 Benjamin H. D. Buchloh. “Gerhard Richter’s Atlas: The Anomic Archive.“ October. 88 (Spring. 1999) : 117-145 : 122. 61

Mapping the Change (RA#7) by the Hackney Museum broadens its archival practice by calling for ‘community observers’ to generate and document relevant materials. This participatory strategy of extended institutionalization nevertheless is an attempt to loosen the power-knowledge relationship and generate materials regarded as relevant by its observers. Its strategic operations on both ends—within the Olympic Machinery and part of a nationwide project and on the grassroots level—address the ambiguity: the potential for alternative production yet for the backdrop of an institutional framework. Currently this project acts as a platform hosting other Olympic related projects. In contrast the East London Lives – Olympic Legacy Archive by UEL (RA#18) announces collaboration with the artist collective behind the Wick Curiosity Shop (RA#10). The shop functions as archive/shop and an event structure with the ‘Mobile Porch’ as urban tool. The archive by the UEL emphasizes on narrated social histories. A collection of ethnographic research investigates the legacy claim of the Olympic Games—as a public issue. The archivization of narratives shifts the process of archiving towards a biopolitical activity, investigating not objects but impacts on people’s life.

The institutionalization of the process of archiving brings the initial quote by George Orwell into the fore addresses issues on control over past, present and future, particularly once the collection aims towards a collective social memory. The examples demonstrate institutional gestures towards alternatives in generating the materials. During the period of the area’s transformation such an invitation proposes to amplify the sense of belonging. The archive gains additional significance since it emerges as a counterbalance to intensify social deficits particularly transgenerational and encounters, where children meet the elderly from a different social space. Thus the nature of such encounters either generating the archive or its revisiting is institutionalized, managed, organised and structured. The legacy of contemporary collecting will be inherited by future generations: to revisit, to re-assemble, to exhibit and to produce knowledge.

62 LDA 9m funding package to support the Games Requiring of the land starts

Olympic Board British Olympics Minister London Organising Committee of London wins the bid the Olympic Games and Paralympic Games (LOCOG)

Jan Feb March April May June July Aug Sept Okt Nov Dez

7/7 Bombings

Games Monitor

23/06 World Olympic Day Timeline 2005 London Employment and Skills Taskforce was set up

Unveiling of the Masterplan

ODA was established

Jan Feb March April May June July Aug Sept Okt Nov Dez

9 weeks of public inquiry on CPO

23/06 World Olympic Day Timeline 2006 Olympic Park Steering Group (OPRSG)

Final Deadline for all occupiers to leave the site

Blue Fence errected around the Olympic Park

Removals from the Olympic site LDA hands the park over to the ODA

2012 Brand unveiled

Jan Feb March April May June July Aug Sept Okt Nov Dez

High Court Rouling for the Clays Lane Estate

Fire on Olympic Site

23/06 World Olympic Day Timeline 2007 Launch of the Cultural Olympiad

Launch of the Get Set Roadshow Regional sporting & cultural events

Bejing Handover Celebrations London Calling Masterplanning team for the post-Games Park appointed

Construction on the Olympic Stadium beginn 3 month ahead

Bejing Games Legacy Now launch (develops the LMF Legacy Masterplan Framework)

Have your say (Community Consultation started) Jan Feb March April May June July Aug Sept Okt Nov Dez

Hackney Wicked Festival

Mayor: Boris Johnson Hackney Wick Festival

19m GBP released to fight terrorism

23/06 World Olympic Day Timeline 2008 electric wired fencing 5.000 Volt fence operates

BBC Building the Dream

Jan Feb March April May June July Aug Sept Okt Nov Dez

Hackney Wicked Festival

Hackney Wick Festival Construction Workers Demonstrate

G 20 demonstrations

Aftermath of Financial Crises

23/06 World Olympic Day Timeline 2009 „Google Mail - Presentation at Birkbeck“ wird geladen 09.09.09 11:20

Margit Neuhold

Presentation at Birkbeck 3 Nachrichten

Margit Neuhold 12. Mai 2009 22:37 An: [email protected]

Dear Rebecca,

first, you did a brilliant job, taking us through the all of the planning and the legacy now project, yesterday evening! I was overwhelmed by all the information and took some time to look through the DVD and all the booklets. It is an extremely exciting project.

However, the question I have, or where one strand of my research project is based on, is the possible change of the artistic community in Hackney. The main attraction will be the IBC / MPC providing much needed jobs possibly including an educational segment. The artistic area will be propelled to progress into high end profile facility-wise, also some smaller and local printing shops will sustain. So far I have understood.

1.) You also mentioned that Hackney has the highest density on artistic population but the character of the area will change tremendously. Is there any detailed information on that, are there projections how the structure of the population may change? Are there any considerations / strategies on that? e.g. will there still be affordable small studio spaces or small gallery spaces available?

2.) You mentioned also a document, which is on the legacynow homepage, which I was not capable of finding (sorry). It is the document of how the profit of the Olympic Games 2012 is divided among all the involving parties. May I ask you to send me the exact link. That would be wonderful!

Thank you very much in advance for taking care of my questions, all the very best, Margit

-- Mag. Margit Neuhold 8 Fairlawn Mansions New Cross Road London SE14 5PH Phone: 0044 79 4390 3416 Mail: [email protected]

Rebecca Haves 13. Mai 2009 16:51 An: Margit Neuhold

Good afternoon Margit,

I am glad you found the presentation interest, apologises about the information over load there is rather a lot of it out there. To answer your questions outlined below, the area of Hackney Wick that I believe you are referring to falls outside of the Olympic Park boundary. Therefore we are not leading on developing a masterplan for this area, our focus is on the Olympic Park itself. As I mentioned briefly in my presentation the areas surrounding the the Olympic Park are currently being looked at as part of fringe masterplans that are being undertaken. There is a fringe masterplan being undertaken for Hackney Wick and Fish Island this is being led by London Thames Gateway Development Corporation. If you would like further information I would suggest you contact Amanda Peck at [email protected]

http://mail.google.com/mail/?ui=2&ik=dccf069a76&view=pt&q=rebecca%20haves&search=query&th=12136c2489d84aad Seite 1 von 3 „Google Mail - Presentation at Birkbeck“ wird geladen 09.09.09 11:20

The document I was referring to used to be hosted on the Mayor website but it has disappeared! It is also hosted on Department for Culture, Media and Sport and can be found at http://www.culture.gov.uk/ reference_library/media_releases/2248.aspx/

I hope this help but please let me know if you have any other questions.

Best wishes

Rebecca Haves Legacy Consultation Officer| Olympic Communications Olympic Legacy Directorate

020 3 2012 517 | [email protected]

London Development Agency Olympic Legacy Directorate 21st Floor One Churchill Place Canary Wharf London E14 5LN Switchboard: 020 3 2012 000

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From: Margit Neuhold [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: 12 May 2009 22:38 To: Rebecca Haves Subject: Presentation at Birkbeck

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RA#1: Jean-Francois Prost’s Adaptive Actions is a multifaceted project centring on micro-actions and adaptive usages. Interested in all kind of spaces and urban structures (street furniture, public space, signs of restriction and control) Prost adjusts them to propose alternative uses and investigates their agency. The website acts as platform1, which through its open call democratically invites global users to upload their micro-actions. Herewith, the site concurrently acts as Jean-Francois Prost All Aboard (2008) inventory investigating perceptions of public urban spaces and people’s relation to it. The publication Adaptive Actions2 (2009) released on the occasion of the artist’s residency at [ Space ] in Hackney, documents his project that call for participation and collaboration on different levels employing group walks and workshops, actively inviting further projects to become part of his Adaptive Actions such as 2070B with Gesche Wuerfel, The Games with Hilary Powel and also the 2012 Olympic Stadium Cats Rescue. During a walk around the Blue Fence he found a paint tin enabling him to identify the exact blue. This incident initiated his London project bearing the name of the colour All Aboard (2008). Prost started to colour objects and plants he found close-by in fence blue: chairs, Santa Clauses, a rocking horse. The artist adapted the gestures of the graffiti removals troops regularly whitewashing the signs of protest signalling urban order and control. Blue was the colour that seemingly survived. Through this performance the artist addresses on the one hand the difference between the materiality of the fence, wood, and colour and on the other hand, the mechanism of surveillance and urban order. But furthermore, the artist’s adaption of the applied rhetoric creates a “positive tension that tests the limit of tolerated appropriation”.3

RA#2: Stephen Cornford appointed himself as artist in residence to the Olympic Site. Using performance as practice, the project circulates around his experiences by Trespassing the Olympic site (2006-2008). His conceptual photographs capture the moments of engagement of these actions: e.g. dangling on scaffolding in front of construction scenery lit by industrial headlights at dusk. On the 18th of November 2007 one of the images depicts the artist clinging onto the neck of a bulldoser, stuck in the detritus ofshredded concrete in front of semi-demolished tower blocks. Besides the collection of different stages of transformation through visuals and sound recordings, the project’s texts4 are a significant document of urban reality. They function as an index of modes of urban control since he performs his

Stephen Cornford: encounters in front of a range of surveillance apparatus: Trespassing the Olympic Site #51 (2006-2008) 1 http://www.adaptiveactions.net/ [accessed 7/08/09]. 2 Jean‐Francois Prost. Adaptive Actions. London: Adaptive Actions & Space, 2009. 3 Ibid. Back side blurb. 4 http://trespassingtheolympicsite.blogspot.com/ [accessed 7/06/09]. 63

patrolling guards, emotion sensors, land rovers, talking CCTV, and dog units or mocked by superficial dog barking. His artistic practice centers on transgressions of transitional spaces, a territory in the public realm under defined Stephen Cornford: Trespassing the Olympic Site #36 conditions. Yet the project goes beyond that and (2006-2008) expresses the search for lost urban interstices and serves to archive his memories. The texts narrate the artist’s engagement with the area back to 1998, when illegal raves and squat parties revealed a potential for an “anarchy that works [...]a self-regulating party where people can enjoy unlicensed entertainment”.5 Such alternatives as well as industrial tourism—the artist’s favourite way to spend a Sunday afternoon—are lost.

RA#3: The fragmentary soundscape Broken Trajectory (2007) by the multi disciplinary artist Richard Crow is edited from 36 hours of recorded archival material. This archive encompasses field recordings, conversations, interviews and personal testimonies but also data and photographs collected on eight walks on the Olympic site between April Richard Crow 6 Broken Trajectory (2007) and July 2007. Richard Crow has invited guests, who have been immediately affected by the change and who have chosen a mutual path. The project “attempts to capture traces of the many indeterminate, in-between places that have been experienced both physically and psychologically in what has become a highly contested, transitional zone.”7 The soundscape reproduces the recordings of local voices, and disseminates how the actual site is determined by the preservation of memories inscribed in rapidly mutating space throughout. The installation at the two-day event organized by ‘WE SELL BOXES WE BUY GOLD’ around the original site adds a further layer onto the site-specificity, which is once more fore-grounded by the five part broadcast of Brocken Trajectory on the local radio Resonance 104.4 fm. This sensitive placement amplifies the work’s political potential transgressing the activation of memories through the sonorous resonance of the voices and unfolds a political potential on a micro level. What the two different ways of ‘displaying’ the soundscape further demonstrates, and brings together, is the absence of accompanying images. Consequently, attention is utterly drawn to the act of listening; the audience is subject to listening. The three parts of the work’s situatedness aim toward a collective memory of the site. Thus the audience’s collective listening might be regarded as the work’s agency towards notions of a collective in the state of becoming.

5 Ibid. 6 e.g.: Katy Andrews (chair, Lammas Lands Defence Committee), Tim Butler (urban sociologist/editor of Rising East), Julian Cheyne (displaced resident, Clays Lane Peabody estate), Bruce Jerram (local historian/photographer/contributor to Rising East), Simon Niziol (economic historian), Julie Sumner (coordinator, Manor Garden Allotments campaign). http://boxesforgold.blogspot.com/ [accessed 28/06/09]. 7 Ibid. 64

RA#4: On the day of the Olympic torch relay (6th of April 2008), Richard DeDominici dressed as torchbearer and ran, equipped with torch, the route of the official relay, five 8 minutes ahead. The video captures the artist Richard De Dominici on Oxford Street waiting on a pedestrian light Beijing Olympic Torch Relay (2008) to cross the street, chatting and posing for photos with passers by and finally running into the applauding crowd. The Olympic torch relay is highly mediated, featuring prominent athletes protected by a swarm of armed policemen. DeDominici’s act targets the official rhetoric of the highly mediated and controlled urban spectacle; his instruments are props and DIY tools such as a hand held video, YouTube distribution and posed action photos. The guerilla method and activist character of his action challenged the system of control and consequently the Metropolitan police confiscated his torch.

RA#5: The call for collective action interlinks All Aboard Silke Dettmer’s Postcard from the Cyan Edge (2009). Also living close by the Olympic site Silke Dettmer responds to the current development and concurrently invites anyone to become part of her work. She photographed the Blue Fence and its inscribed signs of resistance such as graffiti, stickers, or vandalism. This photographic material became the starting point for her postcard installation, in which geometrical rigid lines echo the fence’s control structure. Visitors to the show Olympic Visions at the Nunnery were invited to pick them from the gallery’s wall

Silke Dettmer and take them away. Postcard from the Cyan Edge (2009) Postcard from the Cyan Edge (2009) visualizes the struggle between grassroots voices and the ODA’s graffiti removal troops, who regularly whitewashe the signs of protest signaling urban order and control. Yet Silke Dettmer’s work undermines the graffiti’s fleeting durability, empowering the potential of grassroots voices through distribution and postal circulation of her work.

RA#6: Games Monitor. Debunking the Olympic myths emerged out of No London 20129 an activist organisation lasting for one year and comprised of East Londoners and mainly local groups of environmentalists, the Hackney Marshes Users Group or the Lammas Land Defense Commitee. In February the 2005 IOC visited the site and No London 2012 organised a press conference, demonstrations on the river lea and little march from Stratford to the Olympic site. Generally it was assumed that the bid would go to Paris. As soon as the bid was won, the Games Monitor’s webpage was set up to raise awareness about the Olympic machinery on the international and the local level.

We seek to deconstruct the 'fantastic' hype of Olympic boosterism and the eager complicity of the 'urban elites' in politics, business, the media, sport, academia and local institutional 'community stakeholders'. Our

8 http://dedomenicitemporarywebsite.blogspot.com/ [accessed 19/06/09]. 9 http://www.nolondon2012.org/ On the 10th of August 2009 I had a conversation with Carolyn Smith and Martin Slavin (Games Monitor) which went far beyond the local impact on the Games and I am very thankful for all the insights. 65 network operates with an open, dynamic principle, and functions as a discussion forum, research body, press and political lobby. Our website and online group provide hubs for publication, information exchange and solidarity networking. We are also a contact point for local, minority, and specialist interviewees for press and broadcast media.10

The organisation functions without spokespeople; their media policy is based on ‘individuals and campaigns represent themselves’. So one finds Julian Cheyne the former resident of Clays Lane Peabody Estate, Julie Sumner from the Manor Garden Allotments or Debby Kennett from the Gypsy and Traveller Unit just to name a few with background and concerns. The local interrogations inform on a global scale and the active knowledge exchange with agents from other host cities (particularly Vancouver and Chicago) attracts activists, scholars and media, which generate high cooperation responding to the globally operating Olympic machinery. Moreover, their constantly updated and well-structured webpage hosts a vast archive on accurate researched background papers on local impacts, finance and governance. They are easily accessible and relevant as research source.

RA#7: The Hackney Museum’s Mapping the Change archives the impact of the Olympic Games in its neighbourhood and “will capture the many voices of Hackney’s hugely diverse communities by working with community groups, local artists and individuals to produce photographic, digital media, text, and audio based records of the changes and people’s responses to them.”11 In concrete, voluntary community observers are invited to collect the everyday testimonies beyond the official voice and to map the Borough’s transformation. Emphasizing on social histories and contemporary collecting, the archive aims to collect the full spectrum of voices including the already ongoing work without editorial limitation. Therefore it encompasses both, existing documentations and the production of new records. This project understands itself as an umbrella mapping the Borough while acts under the wider support of the project People’s Record12 a nationwide online archive part of the Cultural Olympiad. As yet Hackney Museum exhibited the archival interactive installation The Big Blue Fence by Penny Cliff on the platform for Mapping the Change.

RA#8: Stephen Gill photographs with a plastic camera he bought at the weekly Hackney Wick market for 50p. Archaeology in Reverse (2007) depicts both the inscribed values of the area, and clues of things to come: a chronicle of the massive transformation catalyzed by the Olympic Games. He traces—like in science archaeology that aims to understand human endeavours—the reconstruction, documentation, analyzing and interpretation of past Stephen Gill material manifestations. Yet Stephen Gill reverses Archeology in Reverse (2008) the sequence of archeological methods. He proposes the documentation and investigation of today’s

10 http://www.gamesmonitor.org.uk/about [accessed 7/06/09]. 11 http://www.hackney.gov.uk/mapping‐the‐change.htm [accessed 7/06/09]. 12 http://www.london2012.com/get‐involved/cultural‐olympiad/culture‐events/people‐s‐record.php [accessed 7/06/09]. 66 material in a psycho-geographical mode before its permanent eradication, and maps the first imprints of the impending change. Since the decision to host the Games was not taken by the area’s residents the photographs act in two modes; they visualize the absence of joy and reveal the first spatial indications of the Games’ arrival. Browsing through his book one encounters poetic urban imagery such as a pigeon landing on a bench next to a graffiti wall, which are opposed by land surveyors wearing neon jackets measuring the river’s depth in a rubber dinghy and the first red marks on trees. Herewith the publication functions as a document echoing both the area’s poetic charm and its impending urban transformation. The socio-cultural, historical, ecological and pictorial investigations of the actual territory challenge the Olympic promises and its computer generated futuristic imagery.

RA#9: Grunts for the Arts13 is an interdisciplinary artist collective which responded to an alarming development of the public funding sector (May 2007 – June 2008). The Arts Council’s grants have been reduced in favour of the Olympic Games, at 34 %, from £ 83 million in 2006/7 to £ 54 form 2007/8. Consequently the collective worked on training artists as athletes. The ‘artistic athleticism’ was undertaken in disciplines such as Handbag Hurling, High Heel 100m or Celebrity Sack Race. Since the public debate was ongoing the collective worked towards re- inventing the Olympic Dream. The project—which is fully documented online—ended with an open Letter to Jacques Rogge (IOC), which puts forward their ironic proposal of re-branding, but utters significant

Grunts for the Arts concerns about the quadruple of the budget from £ Handbag Hurling (2007) 2,4 - 9,6 bn, (which has already reached £ 20+ bn) and the development of the human rights cause. Overall the project spread services showing a readiness to talk have been offered and invitations to the forthcoming DIY Games was outspoken.

RA#10: The Wick Curiosity Shop14 operates as a platform for events as well as an online and physical archive, which features local products, memorabilia, artistic projects, oral histories, songs or collective actions centred on Hackney Wick. The products of the shop go far beyond being commodities yet are drawn together through by being testimonies of a local identity. The process to establish this independent though authored archive (by Public Works and Optimistic Productions commissioned by Space for the Hackney Wick Festival) varies from simple forms of knocking on the local resident’s door to their events among various collaborations; that gathered stories and materials initiated for actions in the future. The idea of the shop’s product, the Wick Calender is informed by the ladies of the Towerbridge Seniors Citizen Club another part of this senior’s community intends to produce a Mix CD facilitated by the shop. Communities such as the Edible Forest Gardens, different Senior Citizen groups, The Hackney Boots or Eton Manors Boy’s Club among many others became involved and the website artistic projects such as The Olympic Spirit by Pudding Mill

13 http://gruntsforthearts.wordpress.com/ [accessed 7/06/09]. 14 http://gruntsforthearts.wordpress.com/ [accessed 7/06/09]. 67 River, The Big Blue Fence by Penny Cliff, Mark Aitkin’s film This Was Forever, Thomas Pausz’s Re-visiting the Community Shed, Tessa Garland’s Park Life, Gesche Wurefel’s Go for Gold, Stephen Cornford’s Trespassing the Olympic Site, The Games by Optimistic Productions or Silke Dettmer’s Postcards from Nowhere. Yet centrally Public Works’ Mobile Porch acts as the physical structure to the shop, facilitating its nomadic events, which serve to bring various communities together and act as showcase to present all kind of projects and actions. The architecture of this multi-functional urban tool “transformed into a stage, a screen, a reception desk, a dinner table, a shop, an exhibition board, a workshop, a billboard, a hang-out… the possibilities are endless.”15

RA#11 Susan Pui San Lok’s multi-screen installation Faster Higher (2008) commissioned by the BFI to be exhibited in summer 2008 and to accompany the handover ceremony of the Olympic Games. Orchestrated by five screen installations and Susan Pui San Lok soundscape it critically investigates mass movements, Faster, Higher (2008) sports and celebratory strategies by re-working footage and mapping contemporary cross-cultural meanings. Olympic’s as well as Chinese documentary archival materials16 are combined with newly shot footage e.g. East London’s Wushu Academy situated nearby the Olympic site, Chinatown in Soho or the Chinese community once populating Limehouse (situated in Host Borough of Tower Hamlet). Faster Higher explores the visual and sonic language of Chinese relations to sports as well as the presence of a Chinese Community in London and its post-imperial relation. The juxtaposition of close-ups within the sports audience and the crowd constructs a collage of images that interrogate the universal language of mass mobilization and national patriotic behaviour. On the athlete’s side, historical and contemporary Olympic aspirations are contrasted with Wushu trainings, a Chinese traditional sport refused by the Committee to become part of the Games. Such mounted scenery transgresses binaries of inclusion and exclusion, and shifts the interrogation towards visual markers and transcultural rhetoric deployed in sports. Multiple of celebratory images are mounted on a collage, which oscillates between light- and darkness. At the same time that responds to global and intimate moments fluctuating on the sphere of cultural, universal and sport events.

15 http://www.publicworksgroup.net/pages/mobile_porch_text.html [accessed 16/08/09]. 16 China did not participate in the Olympic Games between 1948 and 1980. 68

RA#12: More than 100 years ago, Major Villiers has laid the foundation for the Manor Garden Allotments Society17 by donating land to poor locals. Recognised as a uniquely British and recognized institution, the allotment’s site and its approx. 80 plot holders have been evicted by the Olympic machinery. A footpath for the Olympic audience was given priority, the proposals to be included on the Olympic site and resistance have been

proof of the actions inconsequence; the community has Manor Garden Allotment been diminished. Quite a few plot holders have left the Society’s Idea for a Legacy Park (2008) society on account of struggle and eviction and their number might even be reduced due to the announced relocation after the Games. The act of displacing left a bad aftertaste. Part of the furniture and gardening tools were destroyed or stolen and the community lost 18 month of gardening. The new site is smaller and far more rigid and there are still concerns if the society will ever return and if so—what might be the conditions? Meanwhile, the community as plot holders offers exceptional potential for the Games’ branding by showcasing a uniquely British institution; a society proven as inclusive, creative, sustainable and naturally eco friendly. However, through alternative channels this rich story attracted strong interests. Artists have widely responded to these situations and its stories, by documenting changes, questioning power structures and through projects developed collaboratively among plot holders and artists: Thomas Pausz’s Revisiting the Community Shed, Gesche Wuerfel’s Farewell from Garden Paradise, Jan Stradtmann’s Manor Garden Allotments, Mark Aitkin’s film This was forever or the Allotment Show at the Seven Seven Gallery on Broadway Market, just to name a few. The society is committed to continue their struggle and to have an impact on the Games’ legacy.

RA#13: Laura Oldfield’s London 2013 Drifting Through The Ruins was the title of the show held at the Hales Gallery in spring 2009. In the display there were more than one hundred ink drawings featuring the regeneration consequences surpassing 2012 in the east End. Her precise drawings—depicting abandoned Lara Oldfield urban remains, deserted urban fragments, bleak London 2013 Drifting Through The interiors—resemble an urban wall, repeatedly Ruins (2008) overwritten or painted over. Foregrounding the ephemeral traces in the rapidly changing urban fabric she understands it as “palimpsest, a site of perpetual writing and over-writing.” As she states: “The London I conjure up in these drawings is imbued with a sense of mourning. These are the liminal zones where the free party rave scene once illuminated the bleak swathes of marshland and industrial estates.”18 Drifting Through The Ruins challenges the prettified photoshoped Olympic legacy imagery which prefigures the area utterly injected in the capitalist production circuit of 2013. The work addresses on a very particular time, namely the wake of the financial crises which is embedded on the local struggles with the Olympic project initiated to persuade masses. However, Laura Oldfield also as a

17 http://www.lifeisland.org/ [accessed 7/08/09]. 18 http://www.halesgallery.com/exhibitions/_20/ [accessed 7/08/09] Laura Oldfield in her exhibition’s press text. 69 renowned activist artist conveys her political concerns and systemic critique centring on social ambiguous policies. In her cheaply produced fanzines Savage Messiah the artist mobilizes an anarchic punk rhetoric, assembling drawings, texts, photography to respond to theses urgent developments in the contemporary city. Distributed the metropolis from one to ten, from Heathrow to Stratford, it gives an account of her investigations employing psychogeographical drifts and related methodologies over the last few years.

RA#14: Thomas Pausz’s Revisiting the Community Shed (2008) evolved out of his bike rides passing by the Manor Gardens Allotments. He accompanied the period of struggle of the plot holder being first evicted and then displaced under harsh circumstances.19 The physical outcome of this process is the unique community shed and the artist’s publication revealing its elaborate process. To quote from his website: "The design is not ‘inspired by’ a community of gardeners. Instead the designer really wants to become a gardener; while at the same time the gardeners become the designers."20 The collaborative design-process as a method evolved out of many dialogues, careful questionnaires, intense research, construction Thomas Pausz Revisiting the Community Shed (2008) process and finally became an open space for artists, plot holders, friends and anyone being interested first installed outside the!R C A on Kensington Gore and afterwards reached its final destination nearby Leyton, the displaced allotment site.21

RA#15: Hillary Powell’s film The Games (2007) responds to their impending reality on the artist’s doorstep. The sports spectacle is staged in a DIY mode echoing the 1948 Games, held in London. Produced by Optimistic Productions in collaboration with Dan Edelstyn the film maps the local area precisely before the demolition for the Olympic Park started. The shootings scheduled for two weekends in February turned out to become a race against the time22 before the roads were finally closed off. The plot narrates the Olympic schedule within a day: starting with the torch relay and its celebrations, trainings followed by athletic competitions, VIP guests in their lounge, to the award ceremonies and closes in the evening with a single sadly lost athlete on the stage in midst of the leftovers and running away with a girl. The in- situ placement generates a framing reference for the work’s critical comments, e.g. the nocturnal torch- relay celebrations in front of the illuminated Canary Wharf suggest a sideswipe to the neo-liberal capitalist system and the electricity pylon as stage for the boxing comments on their imminent demolition; The applied rhetoric and the iconography of the rich scenes reveal multiple layers of its immediate Hilary Powell presence. It celebrates the area’s urban reality and The Games (2007)

19 Stolen furniture, destroyed allotments, displaced trees that later died, many plot holder reclined, a loss of 18 month, and a new and very rigid site. 20 http://www.pausz.org/ [accessed 7/08/09]. 21 Thomas Pausz. Revisiting the Community Shed. London: Selfmade artistbook. 2008. 22 Hilary Powell, Olympic Sports, Spirits and Stories. In: This Is Not A Gateway Festival Production. London: 2009. (forthcoming). 70 simultaneously responds to its transitional stage, considered as tabula rasa by developers.

RA#16: “Pudding Mill River: Purveyors of Sporting Spirits and Foodstuffs have been gathering the wild fruits of the Lower Lea Valley for generations.”23 The organic homemade food is collected, fondly made, advertised and distributed by a local (artist) collective. Their performative way of the production— investigation on the area, fruit picking, distributions as well as the promotion of the products is— documented on their website. The generally employed DIY mode proposes alternative marketing strategies of the Games e.g. playing on the bun of Olympic Spirit and Pudding Mill River Foraging Adventures (2008) offering the areas distillates. Penetrated by a theatrical optimism the collective addresses the Games’ take over of the public land.

RA#17: Traveller sites24 Two Traveller sites one belonging to Hackney and another to Newham Council have been relocated from the now Olympic site. The negotiations for a possible relocation started in 2004. Having the legal status of council licensees tenants, the LDA has been responsible for their movement. 20 Irish and 15 English Romany Gypsy Traveller families had to undergo the exhaustive process of a Public Inquiry (an publicly held, official evaluation by the government) and CPO’s (Compulsory Purchase Order). The representing independent inspector stated in his final report, that the CPO should not be ratified until such time as appropriate land had been found for the two sets of Travellers. However this was which was overruled and the CPO went ahead. In April 2007 the Travellers from Hackney and Newham challenged this decision by the Secretary of Trade and Industry under the 1998 Human Rights Act, Article 8: Right to respect for private and family life

1. Everyone has the right to respect for his private and family life, his home and his correspondence. 2. There shall be no interference by a public authority with the exercise of this right except such as is in accordance with the law and is necessary in a democratic society in the interests of national security, public safety or the economic well-being of the country, for the prevention of disorder or crime, for the protection of health or morals, or for the protection of the rights and freedoms of others.25

Nevertheless, the case was lost. The struggle for the Newham Council site residents continued: they took a further legal challenge against the LDA on the basis that the land they had been promised for the relocation was suddenly withdrawn and instead they were told they had to be displaced to a local community park which would be demolished to make way for them: They lost the case. Whilst this new park site was being built, the Travellers had to remain living on their old site. But there were problems. The Olympics need to

23 http://puddingmillriver.blogspot.com/ [accessed 7/09/09]. 24 I’m most grateful to Gill Brown (London Gypsy and Traveller Unit) for providing details and co‐ authoring this entry. 25 http://www.opsi.gov.uk/ACTS/acts1998/ukpga_19980042_en_3 71 be built thus demolition got underway right on top of the community living. As Tracie Giles, one of the site residents wrote in a letter to the Guardian in on the 29th of September 2007.

We support the Olympics and last year we were looking forward to a new site to be built by the LDA on land they promised us. But then they withdrew it for political reasons, which we believe was to do with the real value of the land, and instead, with Newham Council, agreed to build our new site on a children’s park. With local people we fought to save the park for families and even went to the High Court but we lost.26

On the Olympic site, the demolition went ahead and the site residents were forced to live in middle of Europe’s largest building site. “Our mail has stopped, our phones are cut off, the street lights are gone and now we have an infestation of rats due to the demolition.27” The act of relocation proved similarly stressful as in 2007 the residents were told on nine separate occasions that they would be moving “next week” – wishful thinking by the LDA who were under huge pressure from the ODA. Most sadly, after three years of struggle the Travellers feel dislocated “like animals in a zoo”. The site looks pretty yet is quickly but badly put together: drains are not working adequately, leaking roofs, doors and windows won’t shut properly and none of the gas electricity and water services were properly set up...moreover the site has been designed as a through road – against all guidelines for the building of Traveller sites. Outsiders drive through sometimes at speed and last year a child was knocked over by a car driven by a local resident.

The dust from the Olympic park building is affecting the Travellers. They have been promised liaison officer but nothing happens. Around them buildings are going up and work for the regeneration of Stratford City. As they feel vulnerable in the new environment they have asked many times to be relocated in a safe position back into the Olympic Park after 2012. It seems the decision for that is a political one –thus they have to keep on campaigning

RA#18: The University of East London’s (UEL) project the East London Lives – Olympic Legacy Archive aims to collect knowledge, from the local people around the Games in the five host Boroughs. “Residents are invited to share their views on how they think the 2012 Olympic Games will impact on the community development and the health of local people.”28 The research explores the Games legacy and its social, cultural and economics promises to change people’s lives. Generated material (including interviews with dislocated or memories from the 1948 Games) will be hosted in the digital online archive, which also provides an interfaces of archival material. Users are invited to comment, to post, to share their experiences or to create groups.

26 Tracie Giles on behalf of the Clays Lane Travellers to The Guardian, The Olympics have made our lifes hell. September 29, 2007. http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2007/sep/29/olympics2012.olympicgames 27 Smith, Carolyn. Games Monitor Background Paper 1: Impact. http://www.gamesmonitor.org.uk/files/BriefingPaper1‐Impact.pdf [accessed 05/09/09]. 28 http://www.uel.ac.uk/news/press_releases/olympic_digitalarchive.htm [accessed 7/06/09]. 72 The project’s strength will be its immediacy, its accessibility as well as its intention to act as a platform (it will go online in September 2009). Mary Smiths initiated project East London Lives – Olympic Legacy Archive, which is publicly funded and just started to collaborate with the Hackney Wick Curiosity Shop.

RA#19: Mark Wayman’s site specific performance

the East London Border was enacted at the ‘Newham Council’s Olympic Park Viewing Gallery’ on the top floor 22nd on Waddington Road in Stratford on the 16th of November 2009. He deployed the strategy of subversion depicting the surrounding of the park, which is officially perceived as negative as positive employing “mnemonic techniques to ‘record’ sites and

Mark Waymann spaces in his head. His recorded memory is then East London Border (2007) ‘played back’ through verbal description and gesture to reveal a structural alternative to the site’s physical state.”29 The audience was asked to re-imagine the Olympic Site with all its facets of the ‘terrain vague’ differently. The performance asks for participation in a very subtle mode through mobilizing the audience’s mental images to subvert macrostructures and redraw a different map of urban reality. The initiation of a parallel thought process offers a potential to enter into a different relation with the impending situation. This project was part of the 2- days event LONDON 2012 NEVER TOOK PLACE: Re-imagining the Olympic zone ‘exploring the 2012 Olympic site and the Lower Lea Valley as a context for interdisciplinary research and artistic intervention’30 which was curated by the collective WE SELL BOXES, WE BUY GOLD.

RA#20: Gesche Wuerfel adapted the materiality of the fence. In 2070B she installed her photographs depicting the last days of the Manor Garden Allotments on the fence and herewith transforming it into an exhibition wall. As required by the urban order, she exhibited her photographs for one day whitewashing them in the evening. This ephemeral act concurrently responds to the erasure of the Gesche Würfel Manor Garden Allotments. 2070 B (2008)

29 http://boxesforgold.blogspot.com/ [accessed 7/06/09]. 30 Ibid. 73 Bibliography

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